Nilgün Okay received an MA in Geology and a PhD in Earth and Environmental Sciences from the City University of New York. She was the first Turkish female scientist to work in the Arctic Seas, participating in marine geoscience expeditions and the Ocean Drilling Project along the margins of the Norwegian and Greenland Seas. Following the Marmara earthquakes of 1999, she collaborated with the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the World Bank Institute (WBI)/Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) on disaster mitigation studies for urban risk reduction planning and the development of graduate education programs, training programs, and materials. Okay is also a founding member of the Women's Studies Center and served as its associate director from 2010 to 2014. Currently, she is a professor at Istanbul Technical University in Turkey, where she teaches and conducts research and consulting projects. She is interested in developing research and technical practices, training local authorities in disaster resilience capacity building, and cross-cutting issues in participatory integrated disaster management.