Bio
Nursel Aydiner-Avsar is an economist in the Trade, Gender and Development Programme of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Geneva, Switzerland. She worked for a project on trade and gender in the East African Community (EAC) and is the lead author of a report titled East African Community Regional Integration: Trade and Gender Implications. She developed a teaching module for the online course on trade and gender in the EAC region and an advocacy strategy based on the findings of the project study. Nursel has also been involved in other research activities carried out by the Trade, Gender and Development Programme, mainly focused on the impact of trade agreements on women's employment in Africa.
Before joining UNCTAD in 2016, she worked as an assistant professor of economics in Izmir, Turkey, from 2011 to 2016. Her main research fields are development economics, the economics of gender and labour economics. Her papers have been published in international journals, including the Journal of Development Studies and Developing Economies, and in international books. She received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Utah in 2011, her M.A. in economics from Istanbul Technical University (ITU) in 2005 and her B.Sc. in management engineering from ITU in 2002.