Prof. Demirköz is an astro-particle physics professor at the Ankara-based Middle East Technical University who is active in science diplomacy. She studied at MIT and Oxford for her undergraduate and graduate degrees respectively, worked at Cambridge University, IFAE Barcelona and CERN for 15 years on silicon detectors and data analysis for the ATLAS Experiment as well as the space radiation studies with the AMS Experiment on the International Space Station. She is currently the director of the Research and Application Center for Space and Accelerating Technologies (IVMER), which performs space radiation tests, builds radiation detectors for space and for medical facilities as well as analyze big data for space science.

Prof. Demirköz was a Marie Curie Fellow under FP7, co-funded THE Port humanitarian hackathons at CERN and received multiple awards including the L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science International Rising Talent fellowship. She served on the governing board of TUBITAK for three years and is a member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences and the Young Global Academy as well as a WEF Young Global Leader.