Professor Burcu Gurkan

Burcu Gurkan is the Kent Hale Smith II Professor of Engineering at the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU). She has her PhD degree from University of Notre Dame and BS degree from the Middle East Technical University. Before her independent academic career, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Chemical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is currently the Director of BEES2 (Breakthrough Electrolytes for Energy Storage Systems) – an Energy Frontier Research Center of US Department of Energy; she previously served as Deputy Director (2022-24), Thrust Leader (2018-22), and Research Integration Officer (2018 & 2022-24). Professor Gurkan is an Associate Editor for ACS Applied Engineering Materials. She served as the Program Chair of Energy & Fuels Division of American Chemical Society, Chair of Transport and Energy Processes Division of American Institute of Chemical Engineers; she is the elected chair of Gordon Research Conference on Chemical Separations (2027). Professor Gurkan was named among the 2019 Class of Influential Researchers by the Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Research – a journal of ACS. Her current research is focused on ionic liquids, deep eutectic solvents, and water-in-salt electrolytes for applications in separations, energy storage, and elecrocatalysis.

During her 2026–2027 sabbatical, Professor Gurkan will be collaborating with Professor Clare Grey on in-situ characterization of electrolytes for energy storage, and Dr Svetlana Menkin on metal plating in unconventional electrolytes, in the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry. As a Visiting Fellow of Clare Hall, she looks forward to engaging with the College’s interdisciplinary community while deepening her work on electrode-electrolyte interfaces.

At Clare Hall, Burcu is accompanied by her husband, Umut Atakan Gurkan, Wilbert J. Austin Professor of Engineering at Case Western Reserve University – a leading expert in translational biomedical engineering for global health equity, and her daughters Maya and Talya.