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Merve Akbas, PhD

Data Scientist and Behavioral Economist

Merve Akbas, PhD, is a Quantitative UX Researcher at Google, specializing in behavioral economics and data science. She has been with Google since November 2019, initially working for Google Ads before transitioning to her current role in Google Search in July 2022.

Education and Background

Merve earned her PhD from Duke University, where she conducted primary and applied research on consumer behavior in Dan Ariely's Behavioral Economics Lab. Her experience includes roles as a Data Scientist at Jet.com and a Behavioral Economist at Aliya Financial Technologies, where she conducted both qualitative and quantitative UX research.

Skills and Contributions

Merve is proficient in tools such as SQL, BigQuery, R, and Python, and has extensive experience in designing experiments, statistical modeling, and mentoring junior researchers. Her work often involves collaborating with product teams to develop hypotheses and measure the impact of various initiatives through rigorous A/B testing.

Languages

She is fluent in English and Turkish, with limited proficiency in German.1

Highlights

Feb 12 · linkedin

My sister gave a talk at ORS conference in her first work-week after maternity leave. So proud of her! Unfortunately, the time off women need for giving birth is still seen as a decrease in productivity in many workplaces and basic maternity leave is still not mandatory in the US. However, if workplaces invest in female workforce, they would reap the benefits in multiples in the long run.

Nov 4 · linkedin

Sometimes less is more. But without experimenting with counterintuitive ideas, we would never know...

Related Questions

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Merve Akbas, PhD
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Experience

Quantitative UX Researcher at Google Search since July 2022
Quantitative UX Researcher at Google Ads (Nov 2019 - Jul 2022), Data Scientist at Jet.com (Feb 2017 - Nov 2019), Behavioral Economist at Aliya Financial Technologies (Apr 2016 - Feb 2017), Behavioral at Morningstar (Oct 2015 - Mar 2016)

Education

Researcher at Dan Ariely's Behavioral Economics Lab at Duke University (Sep 2011 - Sep 2015)

Location

San Francisco Bay Area