Ayşe Erzan

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Ayşe Erzan, born in 1949 in Ankara, is a Turkish theoretical physicist. She studied in Istanbul and earned a BA from Bryn Mawr College in 1970, and a PhD in physics from Stony Brook University in 1976. She returned to Turkey, joined Istanbul Technical University in 1977, and wrote about peace and women’s rights. After the 1980 coup, she left Turkey and worked at several universities in Europe from 1981 to 1990: Geneva, Porto, Marburg, and Groningen, with a short fellowship at ICTP Trieste. She returned to ITU in 1990 and continued research at the Feza Gürsey Institute. She became an associate of the Turkish Academy of Sciences in 1995 and a full member in 1997, the same year she won the TÜBİTAK science prize. Erzan received the L’Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science in 2003 and the Rammal Award in 2009. In 2020, the American Physical Society honored her with the Andrei Sakharov Prize for her lifelong commitment to human rights. She is a member of TWAS and the Science Academy Society of Turkey, and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Statistical Physics and the European Physical Journal B.