Dr. Duygu F. Şafak is Assistant Professor in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) at Bilkent University. Her research lies at the intersection of psycholinguistics and second language acquisition, with a particular focus on language processing, sentence comprehension, and prediction-based learning mechanisms in second language and heritage language speakers.

She received her BA in Foreign Language Education, with a minor in German, from Middle East Technical University (METU). Following her undergraduate studies, she participated in the Teaching Excellence and Achievement (TEA) programme at the University of Arkansas, supported by the U.S. Department of State, and worked as a Comenius Language Assistant in Germany. She subsequently completed her MA in English Language Teaching at METU before continuing her doctoral training in linguistics. In 2016, she moved to Germany and completed her PhD in Linguistics at the Technical University of Braunschweig (TU Braunschweig).

Dr. Şafak began her academic career as a research and teaching assistant at METU, contributing to research projects in psycholinguistics alongside her teaching activities. She later joined TU Braunschweig as a lecturer and subsequently served as a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer (2022–2026), where she was part of the German Research Foundation (DFG)-funded research unit Structuring the Input in Language Processing, Acquisition and Change (SILPAC). In 2026, she returned to Türkiye to join Bilkent University.
Her research examines how multilingual speakers process, adapt to, and learn grammatical structures in real time. Her work has appeared in leading journals including Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, and Second Language Research. Her research has received recognition through competitive international awards and travel grants. She also contributes to the field through peer review for international journals in psycholinguistics and second language acquisition, as well as through conference and editorial service.