Gamze Ünlü profile picture

Gamze Ünlü

Researcher

Integrated Assessment and Climate Change Research Group

Energy, Climate, and Environment

Researcher

Transformative Institutional and Social Solutions Research Group

Energy, Climate, and Environment

Biography


Gamze Unlu joined IIASA as a researcher in October 2019. She is affiliated with two research groups in the Energy, Climate, and Environment Program: the Integrated Assessment and Climate Change Research Group and Transformative Institutional and Social Solutions Research Group.

Her main research interest involves analyzing complex systems that integrate technology, human factors, institutions, regulations, and policies. At IIASA, she contributes to developing the Integrated Assessment Modeling framework MESSAGEix, which represents energy, economy, and climate holistically. She uses this model for scenario analysis, with the ultimate target of supporting policy decisions through various projects, such as Exploring National and Global Actions to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions (ENGAGE), Climate Policy Assessment and Mitigation Modeling to Integrate National and Global Transition Pathways (COMMIT), and Next Generation of Advanced Integrated Assessment Modelling to Support Climate Policy Making (NAVIGATE).

Specifically, Unlu works on the development of the MESSAGEix-Materials module, which covers energy and emission-intensive industries, for example, the production of iron, steel, cement, and different chemicals. This tool facilitates the development of future scenarios to examine decarbonization possibilities within industries that generate material stocks, such as buildings, vehicles, or infrastructure. As part of the CIRCEULAR project, she works on enhancing the representation of material stocks and flows in MESSAGEix-Materials with the goal of improving the representation of circular economy measures and their connection with climate change mitigation in different scenarios. She utilizes the methods common in industrial ecology, such as material flow analysis, to understand the relationship between material stocks, the services they provide, and their energy requirements.

Unlu is also currently enrolled in the PhD program in Social Ecology at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna. In 2019, she earned her MSc degree in Complex Systems Engineering and Management from the Delft University of Technology, specializing in energy systems, modeling, and simulation. She completed her undergraduate studies in Industrial Engineering at the Bilkent University in Turkey in 2017.


Last update: 19 DEC 2023

Publications

Wiedenhofer, D., Streeck, J., Wiese, F., Verdolini, E., Mastrucci, A. , Ju, Y., Boza-Kiss, B. , Min, J. , Norman, J.B., Wieland, H., Bento, N., Godoy Leon, M., Magalar, L., Mayer, A., Gingrich, S., Hayashi, A., Jupesta, J., Unlu, G. , Niamir, L. , Cao, T., Zanon-Zotin, M., Plank, B., Masanet, E., Krey, V. , Akimoto, K., van Ruijven, B. , & Pauliuk, S. (2023). Material Cycles, Industry and Service Provisioning: A Review of Low Energy and Material Demand Modelling and Scenarios. SSRN 10.2139/ssrn.4617908. (Submitted)