2018 LSE Festival research competition Popular Prize winner Nihan Albayrak-Aydemir, describes winning an unexpected prize because of the competition - love. Nihan, a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science, entered the competition to communicate her research and met husband Murat as a result.
Nihan and Murat
I first heard about the Research Competition from my PhD friend Celestin Okoroji, who has won the Popular Prize in 2017. It seemed like a perfect opportunity for public engagement and so, a year later, I decided to enter the competition with my first PhD study.
My PhD research examines the social psychological factors that affect individuals’ attitudes, intentions, and behaviours of helping refugees. I’m investigating intergroup helping in the context of Syrian-refugee emergency with a focus on social identity and cognitive factors. By running cross-cultural studies with online surveys and experiments, I hope to identify distinctive pathways to helping responses by unique groups of potential helpers from different countries.
At first, I was just excited to communicate my research with those who are outside of my field. Although I received a very helpful training from PhD Academy to excel my entry for the competition, I was not particularly expecting to win a prize. All of the submissions on the exhibition were fantastic. So, I already felt proud when I saw my research was shortlisted to be exhibited with all that amazing research.
The exhibition provided me with a unique experience. I got questions and comments on my poster from truly interesting angles that I never heard in any of the academic conferences I attended before. I also got the chance to meet people from different disciplines who are working on similar topics with me.
The benefits of entering the competition, however, were far beyond what I expected! After winning the Popular Prize, I gave a short interview –which later changed my life substantially. Murat told our mutual friend that he wanted to meet me after watching this short interview video… One year later: We got married! So, you wouldn’t possibly guess what this competition might bring to you –future research collaborations, job opportunities, new friends, or new family members!
Murat says:
Nihan and I had a mutual friend who was trying to matchmake me with someone. She sent me Nihan’s video and right after I watched it I wanted to meet her. I was very impressed with her (both in terms of her works and her appearance - of course)! I really liked that she was trying to help refugees both personally and through her own research. She seemed like a good, caring person as well as a conscious researcher who makes a good use of her personal experiences to develop her research interests. So, I got her number from our mutual friend, we started to talk, and I liked her even more. When we finally met in person, there was an instant click and we hit it off really quickly. We got married almost one year later! I’d like to thank the organisers of the LSE Festival Research Competition for bringing me my wife!
Research Competition 2019
You're invited: exhibition and events
How entering the research competition led to one entrant co-curating an LSE Library exhibition
Contact us
Email us at researchcompetition@lse.ac.uk.