Dr. Avci-Karatas received her PhD from the Department of Civil Engineering at the Technical University of Istanbul. She joined the department of Transportation Engineering at the University of Yalova as an assistant professor in June 2014. Dr. Avci-Karatas’s research area focuses on structural engineering, earthquake engineering, and some specific issues of steel structures. She has real-life project experiences on design of new buildings, earthquake reliability of structures, seismic retrofit of existing damaged or undamaged buildings. She has developed, designed, fabricated, and tested metallic seismic energy dissipation device labeled as TURKBRACE-BRB in her doctoral research work. To investigate performance under cyclic loading, full scale steel and aluminum alloy core BRB specimens with simple end details have been designed to AISC specification, manufactured, and cyclically tested in the Structural and Earthquake Engineering Laboratory (STEEL) of the Technical University of Istanbul (ITU). Dr. Avci-Karatas has received 2013 The Best PhD Thesis Award at Structural Engineering in ITU. Her further studies are on seismic performance of tall steel buildings, composite structures, implementation of advanced composite and different structural materials (e.g. aluminum alloy) in structural works. She has specialized in structural analysis and design of the steel and composite systems and checking in compliance with EC3 and EC4, respectively. Prior to her appointment in academia, she practiced as a technical consultant for the Ministry of Environment and Urban Planning. She attended the study on a disaster prevention/mitigation basic plan in Istanbul including seismic microzonation in the republic of Turkey as co-researcher of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality for JICA (Japan International Cooperation Agency) in 2001. Regularly providing consulting services to the industry.