Graduate Alumni
Elif earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from Boston University in 2025. During the 2025-26 academic year, she is a Postdoctoral Associate at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Schwarzman College of Computing. At MIT, she teaches and collaborates on a project with Prof. Georg Rilinger, Prof. Arvind Karunakaran (Stanford), and Julie Seager (a doctoral student at MIT), examining computational thinking—how it’s applied to practical problems and how it differs from economic thinking. Using semi-structured interviews and participant observation, she has conducted research projects that explore how platforms are reshaping the control and autonomy over people’s work and the evaluation of influence. Her research has been supported by the American Sociological Association’s Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant and two internal fellowships awarded by Boston University.