Tugce is a health governance Research Associate at the Hertie School working for the project “Neustart”. She is specialized in evidence-informed health policymaking and brings interdisciplinary work experience in research, legislative work, advocacy and more specifically in knowledge translation and implementation sciences. She spent more than six years in German health policymaking as a policy officer in a self-governing body and in an EU Joint Action as a research scientist in Berlin. In Brussels, she worked on a project on SDGs and intersectoral governance at the WHO European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies and in a European public health NGO as a policy officer.
Besides her position at the Hertie School, Tugce is an external PhD student at the Maastricht University in the Department of International Health. Through her PhD thesis, she aims to discover the context-related factors that influence the translation of knowledge from academia to policymaking with a special focus on digital transformation of health systems. She has an educational background in public health (M.Sc. International Health, Charité Medical University and Bordeaux Segalen University) and public policy (M.Sc. Public Policy, University of Bath) complemented by a postgraduate degree in EU Studies (University of Cologne). Born and raised in Izmir, she is fluent in Turkish, English and German and has some knowledge of French.