Assoc. Prof. ALPER KUMCU

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Translation and Interpreting at Hacettepe University. My research explores language, memory, and embodied cognition through the lenses of data science and psycholinguistics.

I publish in national and international journals in psycholinguistics and cognitive translation and interpreting studies. I have extensive experience in designing behavioural and eye-tracking experiments, programming, natural language processing, and experiment building in Python, as well as conducting statistical analyses and creating data visualisations in R. I am a strong supporter of open, transparent, and reproducible science, and I believe the future of research lies in interdisciplinary collaboration. I am also the proud recipient of the 2019 Hacettepe University Science Incentive Award in the Social Sciences.

I have served as co-editor of the John Benjamins journal Translation, Cognition & Behavior since 9 December 2022. Previously, I was an associate editor of the Hacettepe University Journal of the Faculty of Letters. I also act as a referee for several international journals, as well as for grant proposals submitted to the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TÜBİTAK).

I have taught undergraduate and graduate courses in (cognitive) linguistics, quantitative research methods, cognitive translation and interpreting studies, and related areas at both the Department of Translation and Interpreting at Hacettepe University and the Department of Foreign Language Education at Middle East Technical University. I currently supervise graduate research in these fields at both master’s and PhD levels.

I currently serve as Head of the English Translation and Interpreting Division at Hacettepe University’s Department of Translation and Interpreting, a position I have held since 1 June 2026. I am also a member of the Faculty Executive Board of Hacettepe University’s Faculty of Letters, serving since 9 September 2025, and a member of the Department Advisory Board for the Department of Translation and Interpreting at Bilkent University. Previously, I served as the Research Assistant Faculty Representative at Hacettepe University’s Faculty of Letters between April 2019 and April 2021. Before that, I served as a Senior Student Representative for postgraduate students in the School of Psychology at the University of Birmingham and chaired the Postgraduate Student–Staff Liaison Committee for the PhD in Psychology programme between 2014 and 2015.

Please visit https://alperkumcu.github.io for more information.