Dr Yasemin Taskin-Alp is a sociologist and mixed-methods researcher specialising in inequality, education systems, labour markets, gender and care regimes, and comparative social policy. Her work examines how institutions and specific policy measures shape economic opportunity, labour market participation, and social mobility, as well as the political and social processes through which these institutions and policies emerge and evolve across different cultural and policy contexts. She designs and leads integrated research projects combining statistical analysis, qualitative fieldwork, and computational methods to analyse complex policy environments and generate evidence that informs programme design, policy evaluation, and institutional reform.

Dr Taskin-Alp has extensive experience designing, implementing, analysing, and disseminating research across academic and policy settings. She has led and contributed to projects examining labour markets, education systems, gender inequality, and institutional change, working with interdisciplinary research teams and policy organisations, including collaborations with international research groups and policy initiatives such as UNDP-supported research and education policy programmes. Her methodological expertise includes quantitative analysis in R, Python, and Stata; survey and administrative data analysis; qualitative interviewing and focus groups; and computational analysis of large-scale textual and policy data. Her work produces rigorous empirical analysis while translating findings into policy-relevant insights for academic, governmental, and non-governmental audiences.

She holds a PhD in Sociology with a minor in Computational Social Science from the University of California, San Diego. Her doctoral research combined 60 in-depth interviews, archival research, policy analysis, and quantitative and computational methods to examine the emergence of Islamic early childhood institutions in Turkey. The project analysed how a politically contested childcare model developed through the interaction of local actors, religious networks, and state policy, comparing disadvantaged and affluent urban contexts. It examined how the expansion of these institutions intersected with debates over education, gender roles, and women’s labour market participation, illustrating how welfare institutions emerge and evolve in contexts marked by social inequality, cultural conflict, and competing visions of women’s place in society.

Prior to her PhD, she completed a BA in Economics with a minor in Mathematics at Sabancı University, studied in the postgraduate economics programme at University College London, where she developed training in econometric analysis of labour markets, and completed an MA in interdisciplinary social sciences at Boğaziçi University with a focus on education and social policy.