About

I'm Özgün Barış Kır, an engineer and researcher based in Evanston, Illinois. My academic and technical work sits around artificial intelligence, computation, and the systems that make both practical — how machines represent problems, and how they go about solving them.

I'm a PhD and MSc student in Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering, advised by Prof. Diego Klabjan, working on how to mitigate hallucinations in multi-agentic AI from a heuristic perspective. Before Northwestern I completed an MPhil in Data Science and Econometrics at the Tinbergen Institute (University of Amsterdam, Erasmus Rotterdam, VU Amsterdam) with a thesis on contextual optimization and reinforcement learning for battery arbitrage in electricity markets, and a B.S. in Industrial Engineering at Bilkent University. Along the way I've done research on stochastic network optimization for pharmaceutical supply chains, energy-grid algorithms, crowd-sourced delivery, and generative models for microbial peptides — and worked as a consultant and data scientist at ScaleX Ventures, Mastercard Advisory and McKinsey & Company.

Outside of that, I write essays. Some are in English, some in Turkish, and they tend to circle the same questions from a different direction: culture, art, language, and what it means to belong to a place when you live between two of them.

Currently

Thinking and writing about how we should measure machine intelligence — less by imitation of humans, more by the problems a system can actually solve.

Curriculum vitae

A full account of my education, research, teaching and industry experience is in my CV (updated August 2026).

Download CV (PDF)

Elsewhere

I'm on LinkedIn, which is the best place to reach me.