Dilek Çetin has been an Associate Professor at Süleyman Demirel University since 2017. She received a B.Sc. from the Department of Economics at the Faculty of Political Sciences at Ankara University in 1998 and received a M.Sc. degree in Economics from Akdeniz University. In 2012, she received a Ph.D. degree in Economics from Middle East Technical University. Her dissertation was on knowledge spillovers and clusters with a spatial econometric application on Organized Industrial Districts. She was awarded the Ph.D. encouragement prize from the Turkish Economic Association. Her studies focus on regional economics, and research and innovation policies. In addition to these subjects she studies trade, entrepreneurship and gender issues. Econometric methods such as spatial econometrics, microeconometrics and panel data econometrics are used in her studies. She was a post-doctoral researcher for fifteen months at the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) in Seville, Spain, which is one of the seven institutes of the Joint Research Centre of Directorate-General of the European Commission.