Award for Turkey Correspondent of the Institute

Prof. Dr. Alpay Hekimler has now received the Silver Medal of Honour from the province of Upper Austria for his outstanding services to the development of international scientific relations and the promotion of academic exchange between Austria and Turkey. Hekimler, who has been reporting regularly on current developments in social law in Turkey since 2015 as a correspondent of the Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy in its series Social Law Reports, is also a corresponding member of the Institute for the Law of Social Security and Medical Law at Johannes Kepler University in Linz. In this capacity, he has made a significant contribution to the advancement of international legal studies, as was stated in the laudatory speech. Alpay Hekimler had already been awarded the Gold Medal of Honour by the Republic of Austria in 2015.

Born in Germany in 1973, Hekimler received his PhD from the Faculty of Economics at Istanbul University after having completed studies in labour economics and industrial relations as well as in human resource management in Bursa. After his successful habilitation in 2006, he joined Namık Kemal Üniversitesi in Tekirdağ where he held the Chair of Social Policy and founded the Department of Labour Economics and Industrial Relations. In 2021, Hekimler took over the Chair of Labour and Social Law and became head of the Department of Private Law at Eskişehir Osmangazi Üniversitesi. His main research interests include European, German and Turkish labour and social law, as well as relations between the European Union and Turkey.