Ceren Gürkan

After receiving the competitive Erasmus Mundus scholarship for her master’s studies, between 2011 and 2013, Ceren Gürkan studied the Computational Mechanics double degree program in Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain (host institution) and Swansea University, United Kingdom (secondary institution). She continued her PhD studies with an Erasmus Mundus scholarship again, between 2013-2018, on Simulation in Engineering at Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain (host institution) and Technical University of Munich, Germany (secondary institution), and obtained her PhD degree with Cum Laude distinction on 22/11/2018.

Dr. Gürkan’s research is focused on developing advanced discretization methods for the numerical simulation of flow problems. She has developed and proposed two novel Discontinuous Cut discretization techniques to the community, namely eXtended hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin (XHDG) and cut discontinuous Galerkin (CutDG) methods, and proved that while saving significant computational cost, they offer optimal convergence, accuracy, stability, and high fidelity.  As of January 2025, Dr. Gürkan has 8 publications in prestigious Q1 journals and a book chapter; her work is cited more than 160 times.

After completing her post-doctoral studies in 2019, Dr. Gürkan was offered a faculty position at Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Türkiye, where she worked between 09/2019 – 02/2024 and built NumSimLab, her own research group, conducting independent research activity. The research activity and the research group were funded by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TUBITAK) with the maximum possible budget. Building upon the foundations of XHDG, her group further concentrated on developing stabilization strategies for XHDG discretization, addressing the challenges posed by cut discretizations in unfavorable cut scenarios. Her research group was composed of two master’s students (both graduated as of November 2024) and a post-doctoral researcher (currently a researcher at the University of Michigan Dearborn). In publications J7 and J8, Dr. Gürkan is listed as the senior author, as these works represent the collective effort of her research team.

Currently, Dr. Gürkan works at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), Department of Aerospace Engineering as a Visiting Professor. As the next step in her career, she intends to establish a research group at UC3M dedicated to advancing high-fidelity, cost-effective simulations of wind turbines.

As of February 2025, Dr. Gürkan has been awarded the highly competitive and prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship. In addition, as of June 2025, Dr. Gürkan has also received the esteemed Ramón y Cajal Fellowship in the thematic area of Producción industrial, ingeniería civil e ingenierías para la sociedad.