Hello, my name is Gulcan Ozel Erol and I am from Turkey. I graduated as the highest ranked student from Bilecik S.E. University, Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering Department in 2012. After my graduation, I worked as a research assistant in the same department for four years. During this period, I had an opportunity to assist many important classes such as thermodynamics, heat transfer and fluid mechanics. I studied on numerical investigation of a combi boiler heat exchanger in my master degree. Also, I did research on evaluation of thermodynamic systems using exergy analysis in a research group. In 2015, I won a scholarship from my government for my PhD degree and five months ago I started my PhD at Newcastle University, Mechanical and Systems Engineering (now the School of Engineering). Now, I am studying DNS of turbulent combustion.
My mechanical engineering story began with my father’s support. It was not my childhood dream job. I must admit that I was anxious about my first day at the university, thinking how many girls would be in engineering class like me. Now, engineering is my life. Asking how and why questions to understand working principles of systems became a lifestyle even for small details that others may never think of. I truly feel more independent myself because engineering is a huge field, you can choose your own way in your career. In my opinion, engineering provides an endless learning opportunity while you are trying to solve problems. Making life easier for people by doing engineering is the part which I love most about my job.
I didn’t have any High Performance Computing experience before, I met with HPC when I started my PhD, so it is still a new field for me to discover. Today, HPC plays a key role in the engineering field, an increasing number of researchers need high performance computers to solve their intensive and complex computational problems like turbulent reacting flows. HPC requires being careful not only in your own field but also in the programming field.
As a woman in the field of engineering I can say that we face problems to solve them as a nature of our job, but gender is not a source of these problems. For a long time, engineering was seen as a job only suitable for males. In recent years, this belief is breaking down slowly although not enough for an exact gender diversity. Especially in the field of HPC, this is more critical, I am the only woman in our office that uses HPC. Females should be encouraged in the field of HPC.