Özgenur Kara Balcı completed her LLB at Ankara University Faculty of Law and obtained both her LLM and PhD degrees at Ankara University Graduate School of Social Sciences. During her LLM studies, she joined the University of Mannheim School of Law & Economics in Germany as an exchange student with an Erasmus+ Program scholarship, and during her Ph.D. studies she conducted research at Tulane University Law School in the United States as a visiting scholar with the scholarship of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TÜBİTAK). Since 2018, she has been working as a research assistant at the Department of the Sea and Maritime Law, Ankara University Faculty of Law. She also serves as a researcher at the Sea and Maritime Law Research Association (LexMaris).