Previously, she was the coordinator of the Smart Grid Communications Lab and a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa, Canada. She received the Ph.D. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Engineering in 2009 and 2004, respectively. During her Ph.D. studies, she was a Fulbright visiting researcher at the Computer Science Department of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). She received the B.Sc. degree from the Department of Control and Computer Engineering at the Istanbul Technical University, in 2001. She has received a Fulbright PhD Research Scholarship (2006) and the Siemens Excellence Award (2004), and she has won two Outstanding/Best Paper Awards.