Derya Özkul is a Senior Research Fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre, Department of International Development, University of Oxford. Her work explores migration policies (or the lack of policies) and their impact on migrants and refugees. Her most recent research explores the use of new technologies in migration and asylum governance and their impact on asylum seekers and refugees.

Derya is currently the Principal Investigator of the Algorithmic Fairness for Asylum Seekers and Refugees (AFAR) project at Oxford. In this project, together with a consortium between five institutions led by Prof Cathryn Costello at Hertie School, she explores the use of new technologies in European migration and asylum governance. Derya is also the Principal Investigator of ‘The Governance of AI-based Technologies in the Management of Migration’, funded by the John Fell Fund. In this project she investigates the practices around biometrics and data ownership. In both projects, she is interested in transparency and power relations among different agencies and migrants. Previously at RSC, Derya worked for the Refugees are Migrants: Refugee Mobility, Recognition and Rights (REF-MIG) project.

Before coming to Oxford, Derya was working at the University of Sydney where she wrote her PhD thesis in Sociology and taught various modules, including Introduction to Sociology, Sociological Theory, Sociology of Terrorism and Human Rights and Social Protest. She has published on a range of migration related issues, including diversity and migration policies and their impacts on migrants. Derya also holds an MSc degree in Comparative Politics from the London School of Economics and a BA degree in Political Science and International Relations from Bogazici University in Turkey. As a DAAD alumnus, she held fellowships at Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) and Bielefeld University in Germany.