Defne Kadıoğlu studied social sciences in Düsseldorf and completed her Masters in Human Rights at the University of Essex. She completed her PhD in 2015 at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul at the Department of Political Science and International Relations and was a Stiftung-Mercator-Istanbul Policy Center Research Fellow in 2015/16. Her research interests include neoliberal urban governance and spatial inequality as well as territorial stigmatisation and the link between gentrification and racism and other systems of oppression.

As a guest researcher at CMES Defne will work on two publications, one from her thesis concerning the gentrification of an immigrant-heavy Berlin neighbourhood and one from her new research from Istanbul.