Biography

Ela Serpil Evliyaoğlu is a youth rights worker, researcher and a clinical psychologist with separate master’s degrees in clinical psychology and in political science. Her professional focus is linking individual experiences to cohort approaches especially with young people.

Previously, she worked for public poll companies, provided citizen trainings, leadership consulting to politicians and their teams. She is involved in academic research on political violence and polarisation. She worked for non-governmental organisations to enhance young women's political participation and representation and promotion of youth rights in Türkiye for 10 years. Her international studies focuses on youth rights, political participation and the relationship between politics and mental health. She represented Association of Youth Organizations Forum in Türkiye, at the European Youth Forum and now is a member of Pool of European Youth Researchers of Council of Europe and European Comission and only member from Türkiye to Mental Health Europe network.

Ela is the co-founder of The Network of Psychosocial Support in Civil Society, that aims to build a network among mental health workers and encourage them to discuss the link between policies and mental health as well as the role of psychology on strengthening the relationship between self and community.

As a Policy Leader Fellow, she aims to contribute to migration policies by evaluating the current policies of selected countries by adding a mental health dimension. Her perspective is to serve the mental health needs of both migrants and host country citizens by using non-formal and informal education methods.

Research projects, clusters and working groups

• Expert Knowledge and Authority in Transformative Times
• Transnational Democracy in the 21st century
• Digital transformations and society
• Inequality, welfare and social justice