Azime Tezer

Professor of Urban and Regional Planning, Istanbul Technical University

Azime Tezer works as a professor at Istanbul Technical University (ITU), Urban and Regional Planning Department. Her researches focus on ecological urban planning policies, land use and transportation interaction, biodiversity management in urban areas, tools and techniques for urban natural hazard mitigation, integration of ecosystem services into spatial planning and eco-sensitive watershed management modeling.

She spent seven months at the University of New South Wales, School of Civil Engineering, Department of Transportation, Sydney-Australia for her PhD studies in 1993 and two years at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Ecological Cities Projects, MA-USA as a visiting scholar of UNESCO’s Keizo Obuchi research fellowship and ITU long term research scholarship between 2003-2005. After the 1999 Marmara earthquakes she joined to ITU-US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) ACHIEVE - Train the Trainer Education Program in between 2000-2001 to train national and local government officials, disaster and emergency management personnel, business sector and public through supports from national and international authorities. In between 2001-2003 she participated FEMA Training Courses in US, and in 2006 she participated JICA Disaster Mitigation Training Course in Kobe and Tokyo, Japan. After these courses, she took part in disaster reduction planning; public awareness raising and technical-administrative-community representatives’ capacity development projects at national and provincial levels as PI and CoI. In these tasks, she was responsible to develop training materials for related stakeholders. For eductaional tasks, she has been instructing on urban resilience and natural hazard mitigation related undergarduate and graduate level courses in urban planning and disaster management programs at ITU since 2006.