Dr. Burçin Çakır from Electrical and Electronics Engineering department and Dr. Seçil Gönültaş from Psychology department has been successfully awarded a MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships grant from the European Commission.
Dr. Çakır will focus on chip design for efficient processing of machine learning techniques. It will be an important contribution to output a prototype chip to help build energy-efficient/sustainable electronics for AI processing. Dr. Çakır’s grant is a three-year global fellowship; her project will be conducted at both Bilkent University and Massaschusetts Institute of Technology.
Dr. Gönültaş’s project focuses on examining non-refugee youth’s bystander responses to intergroup bullying of refugee youth in Turkey. Bridging developmental and intergroup processes, the project aims to establish their interplay to promote prosocial bystander responses across two studies. The first aim of the project is to examine social-cognitive and intergroup related factors in Turkish youth’s bystander responses to intergroup bullying of their Syrian peers. The second aim of the project is to test the effectiveness of a novel intervention program that covers components of intergroup contact, outgroup mentalizing, and role models in promoting youth’s prosocial bystander responses to intergroup bullying of refugee peers. This project will help to identify the factors that pose a threat to refugee youth’s inclusion and wellbeing and to harmonious intergroup relations by combining multiple methodologies.
The MSCA grants support research training and career development focused on innovation skills. The MSCA program promotes innovative research training as well as career and knowledge-exchange opportunities through cross-border and cross-sector mobility of researchers, preparing them for current and future societal challenges and enhancing the attractiveness of research centers in Europe and Turkey.