Dr. Özge Hacıfazlıoğlu is currently a visiting professor at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education. She has recently served as a vice president at Hasan Kalyoncu University in Turkey. She holds a doctorate in Educational Administration and pursued her post-doctorate education at Arizona State University. During her time at Arizona State University, she pursued her scholarly research agenda entitled as “Women Leaders in Higher Education” as well as contributing to the college by co-teaching in the Doctorate Program in Leadership and Innovation. She served as an academic administrator (department chair, associate dean, graduate program coordinator in educational leadership and interim dean) at universities in Turkey. Over the last nine years she served as founding associate dean of the Faculty of Education at two universities in Istanbul, Turkey.

Dr. Hacıfazlıoğlu lectured extensively at national and international conferences and educational meetings. She also authored and co-authored articles and chapters in peer-reviewed articles, professional journals and books. Her areas of interest include; “academic leadership, educational leadership, professional development, teacher training, mentoring, narrative inquiry and action research”.  She also served as the Primary Investigator and researcher in the nationally and internationally supported projects. The international arena has long been a focus of her commitment to applying her expertise and network connections in support of schools and students. In addition to being a visiting scholar at Arizona State University in 2008-09 for one full year, she also served as a visiting scholar at Wheelock College in Boston in September 2012. In September 2015, she served as an Erasmus visiting scholar at Riga Teacher Training and Educational Management Academy, where she had the opportunity to teach Masters students in the Educational Leadership program. She visited University of Algarve as a part of the Erasmus Teaching Mobility Program in April 2016, where she had the opportunity to teach Masters students in the Educational Psychology and Educational Leadership programs. She served as a visiting scholar at Leysin American School in Switzerland for one month both in 2019 and 2020. She is still an active researcher for LASER (Leysin American School Educational Research) in Switzerland. Her experience at LAS shows her the utopic picture of how best practices can be implemented at a top-ranked, highly resourced boarding school in Switzerland. She also worked as a part time IB teacher at one of the top-ranked international high schools (ENKA schools) in Istanbul between 2019 and 2020. Being on the school site on the other side of the border also gave her the opportunity to observe good practice. She found it a luxury staying connected to practice and cultivating her skills as a teacher and a teacher trainer.

Apart from international teaching and research, she has served as the national representative of International Study Association of Teachers and Teaching (ISATT) from 2009-2017. She has been the “outreach coordinator” on ISATT Executive Committee since 2017. ISATT has opened paths for her to collaborate with international scholars and teacher educators for more than 20 years. She also serves as the Vice President for Turkish Green Crescent since 2021.

Dr. Hacıfazlıoğlu has always been one of the leaders to promote school faculty collaboration in her career. As a practice oriented faculty member, she has taken active roles at schools, including teacher training, principal training and school development projects in national and international contexts. Finally, her experience as a Vice President since 2020 gave her new insights into academic leadership. She started to look at the notion of academic leadership and communities of practice from multiple perspectives.