Born in Istanbul in 1982, Merve Özdemirkıran-Embel graduated from Istanbul Saint Joseph High School with honors in 2001 and completed her undergraduate studies in International Relations at Galatasaray University in 2006, ranking first in her faculty. Supported by the French government’s Excellence Scholarship, she earned her master’s degree at the Institut d’études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) in 2007, completing her thesis under the supervision of Prof. Gilles Kepel, titled “La politique de la Turquie vis-à-vis de l’Irak: conflit ou coopération?”.

In 2013, she earned her Ph.D. at the Centre d’études et de recherches internationales (CERI) within Sciences Po, under the supervision of Prof. Riva Kastoryano, with her dissertation titled “Construire un État, briser des tabous. Les hommes d’affaires de Turquie entre la construction du Gouvernement régional kurde et la politique étrangère de la Turquie.” During her doctoral studies, she was supported by Sciences Po’s merit-based scholarship.

Between 2010 and 2013, Özdemirkıran-Embel regularly taught courses at Sciences Po and the University of Paris 13. In 2013, she returned to Turkey and joined the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Bahçeşehir University. Since 2015, she has been serving as a faculty member in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration (French) at the Faculty of Political Science, Marmara University.

As of 2021, she has been serving as the Deputy Director of the Center for Research and Application on Turkey–France Relations at Marmara University. Her academic research focuses on Turkish foreign policy, state-building, transnational actors, and feminist international relations.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Özdemirkıran-Embel is a member of the Horizon 2020 – Central Asian Law project coordinated by Lund University. She has also served as a researcher in the Transnational Health Strategies in the Euro-Mediterranean Space (THeSIS) project, supported by the La Caixa Foundation (Spain), Wellcome (United Kingdom), Volkswagen Foundation (Germany), and Novo Nordisk Foundation (Denmark).

She is a member of the Turkish Political Science Association (SİTD), the International Relations Council (UİK), the Saint Joseph Alumni Association, and a congress member of the Beşiktaş Gymnastics Club. She is married and the mother of two children.