Professor Gozde Ozakinci

Professor and Deputy Dean of Faculty

Psychology Stirling

Professor Gozde Ozakinci

Contact details

About me

I have received my BA in Psychology in Bogazici University, Istanbul. Having had a chance to volunteer as a research assistant in health psychology during my undergraduate years which really attracted me to that field. I took a year of community service volunteering in a psychiatric hospital, Whitchurch Hospital, Wales and decided that I wanted to pursue postgraduate training in health psychology. I did my MSc in Health Psychology at the University College London, under the supervision of Profs Charles Abraham and John Weinman. I then worked as a teaching assistant at Istanbul Bilgi University. I returned to my postgraduate training and arrived at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey through an Excellence Fellowship. Having completed my PhD under the supervision of Prof Howard Leventhal, I took up a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of St Andrews. In 2021, I started as Professor in Psychology at the University of Stirling. I was the Chair of British Psychological Society, Division of Health Psychology- Scotland, 2020-2022 and am currently the President-Elect for European Health Psychology Society.

I am a health psychologist and I study:

  • Management of long-term conditions: I particularly focus on cancer. One of the main areas that I work on is the management of fears about cancer recurrence. This continues to be one of the most important areas that cancer survivors and their caregivers struggle and I work on ways of assessing these fears and designing support programmes for management of these fears.

  • Community-based health promotion: In this area, I specifically focus on physical activity. The jogging programmes that are run by citizens fill in a big role in promoting physical activity at the community-level. I work on understanding how they work and how we can increase access to them. I also focus on social prescribing and understanding how it works.

  • Pro-environmental and health behaviours: Increasingly our health behaviours and environmental behaviours intersect and sometimes that intersection means that what we do for our health (e.g., active commuting) is also good for the environment (e.g., less air pollution) but sometimes it does not (e.g., use of wet wipes). I study what this intersection means for behaviour change.

I use a variety of psychological theories and methods to find answers to questions that are important for health and environment.

I am also currently the President-Elect of European Health Psychology Society.

I welcome opportunities to collaborate and supervise doctoral students so please get in touch.

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