Emine Yilmaz earned her Ph.D. in computer science at Northeastern in 2008. Now, she’s an associate professor at University College London (UCL) in London. And though she’s moved an ocean away and gone from attending classes to shaping and leading them, she’s taken the lessons – and lesson styles – from Northeastern with her.

“I feel like I’m advertising [Javed Aslam], but really, I think he’s the best teacher I’ve seen,” Emine says, laughing. Aslam was Emine’s advisor and collaborator on several research projects and publications. “I really try to take him as a role model. He would make very complicated things look very simple in the way he would describe the ideas behind it, giving real world examples.”

Her students are appreciative of her teaching style, she says, adding that she’s received positive feedback about the clarity and enthusiasm of her classes. Emine teaches graduate-level courses at UCL, where she’s been for three years.

She moved to Boston after completing her undergraduate studies at the Middle East Technical University in Turkey, earning her masters degree and Ph.D. from Northeastern. Being an international student wasn’t always easy, Emine says. She describes the support from Aslam as vital to her accomplishment on campus and after completing her program.

“I was unsure at the beginning and it was really difficult to get used to the society and things like that, but my advisor was extremely supportive,” she says. “That’s the primary thing that led to my success.”

That support is one of the key things Emine remembers of her five years on campus. Courses she took also stand out as highlights, as well as the research she was able to conduct. The algorithms course taught by Aslam is the first class she names. “I felt that I hadn’t learned it as well in my undergrad,” she says. “It was really different and it was really deep.” Emine also took advantage of Northeastern’s interdisciplinary approach to its degree programs and enrolled in a probability and statistics course offered by the math department.

But it’s the research she’s undertaken that established her name in the computer science field. She received a Google Faculty Research Award in 2014 for a research endeavor that looked at task-based information retrieval. That focused on getting information retrieval systems – like an online search engine – to understand why users are looking up certain queries and what other queries might be relevant to the underlying task. For example, someone looking up hotels in London might be travelling there, so information on flights and local attractions could also be relevant.

With Aslam, she developed a sampling based method for evaluating the quality of search engines with fewer relevance judgments, a project that was adapted for the Text Retrieval Conference, founded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Emine’s methods have also been used by the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval and the Cross Language Evaluation Forum, and sampling is now a standard method used for efficient retrieval evaluation.

“I think that’s one of the things that led me to getting an internship at Microsoft Research,” she says. “I still get people asking me questions about it. A random person I meet from my field would most likely have read one of these papers related to this topic.”

After completing her Ph.D., Microsoft Research, where she had been an intern, offered her a position as a postdoc. She stayed there for two years as a postdoc, and then became a researcher, working closely with other teams on projects related to various Microsoft products.

She continues to work there, spending one day each week at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England, and the rest of her time teaching at UCL. “I like the set up I have right now because I have my feet in both worlds,” she says, not wanting to choose between industry and academia.

“What I enjoy most about teaching is seeing students learn,” she says. “At the beginning, they are unsure and you see that they ask questions and they don’t know. After some time, you see them questioning really important things that you may not even be able to answer or that are open research questions. I think it’s a great achievement in that regard, because in a sense, you help the student grow.”

She watches her students undergo the same learning process she did in Northeastern classrooms, and she says her favorite professors influence her teaching methods.

After all her experience in the field – as a student, researcher and professor – Emine says one of her constant difficulties in navigating the computer science world is being a woman. Women remain a minority in the field, she says. “At Microsoft, in my whole research group, I was the only female when I was a researcher.” That was a group of about 30 people. But she considers herself lucky to have been surrounded constantly by understanding advisors, mentors and supervisors.

“Having a supportive manager who can really support you is important for everyone, but especially for women,” she says.

-As seen in the February 2016 E-Newsletter-