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Dr Tuba Bircan
Senior Social Scientist
Engagement and Society
“Equal opportunities and access to fundamental rights are essential for creating a fair and just society, and research and innovation, conducted with ethics and integrity, can play a critical role in achieving this goal. Ultimately, the citizens should be at the core of research and innovation as it is crucial to involve and engage the public in research, ensuring that their voices are heard, and their needs and concerns are taken into account. Only then we can achieve more relevant and impactful research, with greater social and economic benefits for all.”
Tuba is an interdisciplinary social scientist who is passionate about ethically and socially responsible use of new technologies with and for society. Her research interests cover a wide range from public perception on new technologies, inequalities, migration, social and public policies to survey methodology, use of Big Data and AI for studying socio-political challenges. She is a follower of open science and science for society.
Adopting participatory and mixed methods approaches, she has collaborated with scholar of numerous disciplines, civil society organisations and industry partners. She combines her statistical expertise with political science and sociological background to seek answers to complex societal research questions around new technologies for health, particularly genomics and genetics, as well as for migration. She has prioritised her work around equal opportunities, citizen science, mixed methods and evidence-based policy making. She has published mainly on the methodological aspects of migration studies, use of Big Data and AI in social sciences and inclusive policies and inequalities. Her expertise in migration, diversity, vulnerable groups synthesised with quantitative and computational methods underlines the significance of interdisciplinary and participatory approaches in her research. The concept of “equal opportunities” sits in the core of her research interests. As a female scholar with a migrant background, she is a culturally sensitive researcher who is committed to fostering a positive culture. Her research strategies are to promote equality, diversity, and inclusion in the design and implementation of research and dissemination and exploitation of the outputs.
Besides being passionate about research and student-centric teaching, she has profound experience in quantitative research methods, advanced statistical models, survey design as well as mixed methodologies. She attaches great importance to communicating complex ideas clearly and accessibly with a wide variety of partners including non-expert audience. Her solid, wide, and active network includes not only with academic scholars and institutes but also industry partners, public authorities, international institutes, civil society organisations, public, and migrant and refugee communities in Europe. She currently sits in numerous advisory/ethical boards of public institutes and civil society organisations. In addition, she has been working as an external expert for the European Commission; and several national institutes. She invests in understanding public acceptance of and trust in science and technology, effective science communication and multi-stakeholder outreach for not only her own research but also for the research group and the institute at large.
My publications
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- Selected
- 2023
Public engagement with genomics.
Wellcome open research 2023;8;310
As detailed in its flagship report, Genome UK, the UK government recognises the vital role that broad public engagement across whole populations plays in the field of genomics. However, there is limited evidence about how to do this at scale. Most public audiences do not feel actively connected to science, are oftenunsure of the relevance to their lives and rarely talk to their family and friends about; we term this dis-connection a 'disengaged public audience'. We use a narrative review to explore: (i) UK attitudes towards genetics and genomics and what may influence reluctance to engage with these topics; (ii) innovative public engagement approaches that have been used to bring diverse public audiences into conversations about the technology. Whilst we have found some novel engagement methods that have used participatory arts, film, social media and deliberative methods, there is no clear agreement on best practice. We did not find a consistently used, evidence-based strategy for delivering public engagement about genomics across diverse and broad populations, nor a specific method that is known to encourage engagement from groups that have historically felt (in terms of perception) and been (in reality) excluded from genomic research. We argue there is a need for well-defined, tailor-made engagement strategies that clearly articulate the audience, the purpose and the proposed impact of the engagement intervention. This needs to be coupled with robust evaluation frameworks to build the evidence-base for population-level engagement strategies.
PUBMED: 37928209 PMC: PMC10624956 DOI: 10.12688/wellcomeopenres.19473.2
What Difference Can Public Engagement in Genome Editing Make, and for Whom?
The American journal of bioethics : AJOB 2023;23;7;58-60