Zeynep Şahin Mencütek is currently a Senior Researcher at Bonn International Centre for
Conflict Studies (BICC) in Germany. She co-leads a Horizon Europe project, called GAPs on migrant returns and return policies. She is also a Research Affiliate with the Canadian Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration at Toronto Metropolitan University and conducts joint research on the thematic area of Governance of Migration in a Globalizing World. She held the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers (June 2020–May 2021) and an international fellowship at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research in Duisburg (2019–2020). Previously, she worked as an Assistant Professor in Turkey, and in 2018 achieved the rank of Docent in the field of international relations. Zeynep received her PhD in politics and international relations from the University of Southern California in 2011. Her research interests include politics of migration, migration governance, return migration and Middle East politics. She has published in a wide variety of international peer-reviewed journals in the fields of migration and international politics, Besides dozens of book chapters, she also published a monograph, Refugee Governance, State and Politics in the Middle East(Routledge 2018) and recently co-authored the book, Syrian Refugees in Turkey (IMISCOE Series, 2023) and an edited volume titled, Migration and City ( IMISCOE Series, 2024). She is the associate editor of Journal of Migration Studies and board member of Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies.

Hakan Gülerce completed his master's degree at Istanbul University, Department of Social Structure-Social Change in 2012 with his thesis titled “The Role of Editing in the Development of Social Sciences and a Sociological Study on Academic Journal Editors”. He graduated from the Department of Sociology of the same university in 2017 with his doctoral thesis titled “The Reproduction of Christianity in the Encounter with Modernity”. In 2018, Gülerce started to work as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Harran University and continued her postdoctoral studies in the fields of migration, social cohesion, youth studies, modernity and religion.

Gülerce received the title of associate professor in the fields of Sociology of Migration and Sociology of Religion in 2022. Gülerce, who is the director of Harran University Migration Policies Application and Research Center, has been and continues to be the coordinator of various projects on migration, forced migration, Syrians in Turkey and social cohesion in this center.

Gülerce, who served as the secretary general of the International Federation of Social Science Organizations between 2012-2019, assumed the presidency between 2019-2023.  He is currently a board member of the same organization.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Soner Akın is an academic specializing in topics such as political life and institutions, international relations, political sociology, history, environment, health, urban and cultural policies, and comparative political movements. He has completed doctoral dissertations on environmental policies, health politics, and the political economy of archaeological research. Throughout his academic career, he has conducted innovative research with interdisciplinary approaches, gaining recognition in both national and international academic circles. Currently, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Akın serves at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Hatay Mustafa Kemal University.