TARIK TUNCAY

Tarık Tuncay is a Full Professor in the Department of Social Work at Hacettepe University — Türkiye's pioneering school in the field, where he has served on the faculty since 2000 — and a Visiting Professor at the Bursky School of Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis. His work sits at the intersection of social work, public health, and social policy, and centers on the psychosocial well-being and social protection of children, women, and families living through migration, poverty, displacement, and other forms of adversity.

Tuncay has led and contributed to research and development projects funded by national ministries, the European Union, and United Nations agencies, designing and evaluating culturally grounded psychosocial support and empowerment interventions for populations facing structural disadvantage. He directed the €3.4 million EU-funded Özne Çocuk project, a three-year initiative to combat child labour and early and forced marriage while strengthening Türkiye's broader social protection system, and has worked closely with the Turkish Ministry of Family and Social Services and international organizations on child protection systems and the rights of refugees and migrants, including consultancy to UN agencies on protecting the rights of populations in vulnerable situations.

Across more than 150 scientific publications, a considerable share of Tuncay's scholarship examines the psychosocial dimensions and determinants of health: coping and quality of life among people living with cancer, diabetes, and asthma; the caregiving experience in schizophrenia and multiple sclerosis; trauma, disaster, and posttraumatic growth, including earthquake preparedness and the psychosocial aftermath of terrorism; stigma and resilience among individuals affected by parental mental illness; and the practice and evidence base of medical and health care social work. This body of work reflects a sustained effort to bring social work's psychosocial lens into dialogue with public health — connecting individual and family-level experience to the systems and policies that shape health outcomes.

A mixed-methods researcher who teaches postgraduate courses in quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method research, Tuncay has supervised more than twenty-five graduate theses and serves as a reviewer for numerous international journals. He is currently extending this research agenda across Hacettepe and the Bursky School to examine the well-being of refugee and migrant youth in contexts of forced migration — work he sees as a natural bridge between social work's practice-rooted, psychosocial tradition and public health's population-level, interdisciplinary approach to building healthier, more equitable communities.

• Child, family, and migrant welfare

• Social policy and service-system strengthening

• Child protection, labour, and early/forced marriage

• Psychosocial support and empowerment interventions

• Psychosocial determinants of health

• Trauma, disaster, and medical social work

• Mixed-methods research