Simge Özdal-Oktay is an Urban Design Specialist who focused on Sustainable Urban Development and Communities throughout her career. She received her B.Sc.  from Gazi University, Department of City and Regional Planning in 2006. She moved to Istanbul to study Urban Design and received her M.Sc. with the degree of excellence at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University (MSFAU), Department of Urbanism. In her Ph.D. studies at the same university focused on the localization of integrated sustainability assessment methodologies over the case of Turkey. During her Ph.D. studies, she also enrolled several classes of Geographic Information Systems at Istanbul Technical University, Institute of Informatics. In 2015 she successfully completed the Urbanism Ph.D. program with her dissertation on  “Evaluation of existing neighborhood scale sustainability assessment methods and developing a locale-specific methodology for Turkey”, and graduated with the high achievement.

During her Master and Ph.D. studies, she had been working for Gebze Technical University, City and Regional Planning Department as a teaching and research assistant. Between 2016 and 2018 she moved back to Ankara and started to work for Cankaya University, City and Regional Planning Department as a Lecturer. Within these two years, she conducted several lectures including Introduction to Urban Planning, Introduction to Urban Design, Urban Planning Studio, Sustainable Communities and Design, and Sustainability Assessment. Since 2015, she provides consulting and education services on the topics of sustainable neighborhood design and sustainability assessment under the roof of Global Visionary Partners Green Building Consulting. She also took part several government projects funded by the Ministry of Environment and Urbanism of Turkey both as a researcher and as an urban design specialist. Some of the projects that she took part are “Preparation of Urban Design Guidelines, Development Urban Spatial Standards, and Şahinbey District Urban Design Guideline”.  Currently, her research interests encompass the following topics:

• Smart design solutions
• Smart tools in public participation
• Geographic information systems
• Virtual reality
• Cognitive urban design
• Cellular automata
• 3D Modelling
• Mobile GIS