Ilke Canakci was awarded a PhD from the University of Connecticut in 2013. She was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Leicester from 2013-2015, at Durham University from 2015-2017 and at Newcastle University from 2017-2019, before starting as an Assistant Professor at VU Amsterdam.

Canakci’s general areas of interest lie in the intersection of representation theory, combinatorial geometry and algebraic combinatorics; and more specifically cluster algebras arising from marked surfaces, their categorifications and related topics such as representation theory of gentle algebras, Grassmannian cluster categories, dimer algebras, combinatorial interpretation of continued fractions, frieze patterns and, quantum and infinite generalisations.