Ekin Dursun is a doctoral student at Yale with 13 years of professional experience bridging software development and empirical social science research. Trained in economics (University of Chicago) and political science, Ekin combines rigorous academic methods with practical engineering—contributing bug fixes and type-checking improvements to the widely used mypy project while also refactoring UI components in popular React libraries. Their background includes research roles at top institutions like the University of Chicago and leadership on policy-oriented projects such as a Universal Basic Income initiative, reflecting an unusual mix of data-driven policy work and open-source software craftsmanship. Based in Istanbul, Ekin is adept at translating complex, interdisciplinary problems into reliable code and reproducible research pipelines.
13 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Political Science and Government, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Political Science and Government at Yale University
High School Diploma, High School Diploma at The Koç School
Bachelor of Arts - BA, Economics, Bachelor of Arts - BA, Economics at University of Chicago
Contributions:15 commits, 15 PRs, 54 comments in 3 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Ekin primarily contributed to bug fixes and improvements within the mypy codebase, focusing on type checking and static analysis for Python. Their work involved addressing issues related to infinite recursion, crashes involving specific language features like namedtuples and dataclasses, and type-related errors. The user implemented solutions by modifying core files to enhance the accuracy and robustness of the type checker, ensuring proper handling of various Python constructs.
A lightweight but complete datetime picker react component.
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Contributions:10 reviews, 10 commits, 6 PRs in 8 days
Contributions summary:Ekin primarily contributed to the development of UI components within the `react-datetime` repository. They refactored code by extracting a common navigation component to promote code reuse. Their commits involved removing unneeded parameters and moving calculations for performance improvements. The user's work also included adding default render props and splitting source files into directories for better code organization and maintainability.
datetimereact-componentreactdatepickercalendar
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.