Faculty
Lerzan Aksoy
Lerzan Aksoy is Assistant Professor of Marketing at Koç University in
Istanbul, Turkey. Her research interests include consumer satisfaction and its
relationship to customers spending patterns, customer relationship management,
impact of recommendation agents in the online environment and consumer decision
quality. Her articles have been accepted by such publications as Journal of
Service Research, Marketing Management, and Managing Service Quality.
Additionally, she has contributed interviews and articles featured in magazines
such as Capital, Platin, Infomag and CRM Pro.
Lerzan has provided executive training on consumer behavior, customer
relationship management and e-commerce to executives from Migros, Ford-Otosan,
Pastavilla, Arçelik, Aygaz, Koç Portfolio-Investments, Koçtaş, Tofaş, TNT
Logistics, Beko, Pfizer and Finansbank. In addition, she has consulted with
companies such as AC Nielsen, Sony Eurasia, LOreal, SESU Cosmetics, Hayat
Chemicals and non-profit organizations such as the Turkish Educational
Volunteers Foundation (TGEV).
Prior to joining Koç University, Lerzan worked for ICASIT (International Center
for Applied Studies in Information Technology) at George Mason University in
Fairfax, Virginia. While at ICASIT, she was involved in sponsored projects aimed
at leveraging information technology in international markets (with World Bank)
and application areas such as course delivery (GMU and American Management
Systems) and multi-media training (with Lockheed Martin).
She earned a BS from Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey, and was awarded the
Fulbright Scholarship to pursue her MBA degree at George Mason University in
Fairfax, Virginia. She has a PhD in marketing from University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hills Kenan Flagler Business School.
Zeynep Akşin-Karaesmen
Zeynep Akşin is assistant professor of operations management. She has joined Koc University in Fall 2002. Previously she worked as an assistant professor at INSEAD.
Zeynep received a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Middle East Technical University (ODTÜ), Ankara, Turkey in 1990, and a M.S. (1994) and PhD (1996) in Operations Management from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
Her research is in the area of service operations management,
and stochastic modeling, in particular in call center design and management
problems, and modeling of service delivery systems. She currently teaches
service operations management and supply chain management electives to business
undergraduates as well as MBA students, and operations management in the EMBA
program.
Özden Gür Ali
Özden Gür Ali is assistant professor of operations management
and information systems. She has joined Koç University in 2004 after ten years
of global management consulting experience with GE and Fortune 100 companies in
marketing, sales, productivity and quality.
Most recently she was with ZS Associates consulting health care and in
particular pharmaceutical clients in sales and marketing strategy and
operations. Prior to ZS, Ozden was with General Electric Research and
Development where she worked with GE businesses such as Plastics, Medical
Systems, NBC and Capital on business growth and productivity projects, using
quality (Six Sigma) and data mining methods. She also trained and evaluated
Black Belts as part of GE's Six Sigma effort.
Özden received a B.S. degree in Industrial Engineering from Bogazici University
in 1989. She holds a master's degree in Industrial and Management Engineering
(1990), and a PhD in Decision Sciences and Engineering Systems from Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute.
Her current research interests are in Sales Response Modeling, Customer
Segmentation, Healthcare Systems Modeling, Marketing Mix Modeling and Data
Mining. Ozden teaches Management Science, Quality, project management and
forecasting courses in BA and MBA programs at Koc University.
Evrim-Didem Güneş
Evrim Didem Güneş is an assistant professor of operations management. She has
joined Koç University in Fall 2004. She
received her B.S (1997) and M.S. (1999) degrees in
industrial engineering from Bilkent University, and a
Ph.D. degree
in operations management from INSEAD (France).
Her current research interests are in service operations modeling,
particularly dealing with call
centers and health care systems. Evrim teaches operations management in BA
program in Business Administration.
Fikri Karaesmen
fkaraesmen@ku.edu.tr, Web Page
Fikri Karaesmen received a B.S. degree in Industrial Engineering from METU in 1990, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Northeastern University (Boston, MA) in 1992 and 1996 respectively. Currently, he is an associate professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering in Koç University. Prior to joining Koc University, he was a researcher at Laboratoire dInformatique de Paris 6 (Université Pierre et Marie Curie Paris 6), and an assistant professor at Laboratoire Génie Industriel at Ecole Centrale de Paris.
His research focuses on stochastic models and their applications on production, inventory, or service systems. His interest in Call Center modeling and analysis grew out of a research collaboration with Bouygues Telecom. This collaboration has led to several research papers, and two international patent applications.
Lerzan Örmeci
Lerzan Örmeci is assistant professor of industrial engineering at Koç University since 2001. After finishing her doctoral research on the optimal dynamic control of loss systems, she joined Stochastic Networks Group of EURANDOM (European Unit for Research and Analysis of Non-Deterministic Operational Models) in the Netherlands as a research fellow. She continued her research on loss systems, with an emphasis of applying her theoretical results on call centers. Moreover, she was a part of the project group funded by Philips Research to analyze access networks mathematically, which aimed to complement and strengthen the simulation based approach of performance analysis, as carried out within Philips Research. During her stay in the Netherlands, she also gave a course on Markov processes for junior econometrics students at Erasmus University.
Lerzan received her B.S. and the M.S. degrees in industrial engineering from
Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, a Ph.D. degree in operations
research from the Case Western Reserve University in 1990, 1993 and 1998
respectively.
Her research focuses on Markov decision processes and queueing analysis and
control. She works on applications for call centers, telecommunications systems,
pricing issues in service systems and supply chains. Lerzan teaches probability,
applied statistics, service operations analysis, and stochastic processes
courses in BS and MS programs in industrial engineering.
Research Assistants
Nesrin Çakan
Hazal Özden