Tuğba Sen is a PhD student at USC Annenberg. She received her BA in sociology from Galatasaray University in 2019. She completed her MA in social policy at Boğaziçi University in 2022 with a thesis analyzing the intersections and tensions between political and health communication in Turkey during the COVID-19 pandemic. She was the recipient of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute-Boğaziçi University Postgraduate Scholarship for her work on her thesis.
Sen worked as a researcher at the Boğaziçi University Social Policy Forum throughout her MA studies, and later as a research assistant at Should We Studio. During her undergraduate studies, she worked on podcast production and the 48 Hour Film Project as an intern at BO Productions and as a research intern at the Association of Migration Research. She volunteered to teach English and French at local community centers and as the editor of the publication of Poedat, a youth collective in Istanbul.
Broadly, her research interests include online communities and movements, online and new media, and human rights and the discourses surrounding them. She has presented papers at international and national conferences, had pieces published in national non-scholarly journals and has contributed academic and non-academic translations to books and journals.