Reflecting on my Leadership in Action project
I joined CPPS for my LiA because I wanted to understand how they had made earthquake preparedness practical, interactive, and memorable. In exchange, I worked as a multilingual tour guide and translator. Day to day, I explained how earthquakes happen, discussed what people should do before, during and after one, guided visitors through interactive activities and prepared them for the earthquake simulator.
What I had not anticipated was how much I would learn simply by working with so many different people. Police trainees thought about their responsibilities as first responders; children often treated the simulator as an exciting experience while still asking surprisingly thoughtful questions; some visitors immediately began reconsidering their emergency kits, while others found the shaking overwhelming enough that the simulation had to be stopped.
It challenged some of my assumptions about education. Children can absorb far more than we sometimes give them credit for. I learned that making information accessible does not mean diluting the science or hiding difficult realities. It means explaining them clearly and honestly, at the right level, while trusting the audience’s ability to understand.
Outside the tours, I tried to understand why CPPS’s approach worked. I attended lectures and events at HES-SO Valais-Wallis and spoke with geologists, physicists, architects, engineers and specialists involved in developing disaster-preparedness education. These conversations made me realise that preparedness is not simply a question of identifying technically correct advice and communicating it effectively. The advice itself has to make sense within the lives of the people expected to follow it.
One example particularly stayed with me. Standard earthquake advice often tells people to take cover beneath a sturdy table. Yet architects I met who volunteered in disaster struck regions had worked with communities where people commonly ate and spent time on the floor, meaning that a suitable table might not even be nearby. I immediately recognised the familiarity. My own grandparents in Türkiye often ate sitting on the floor.
It was a simple example, but it captured one of the most important lessons of my LiA: a technically correct solution is not necessarily an effective solution if it ignores the people expected to use it. Disaster preparedness cannot simply be developed in one context and transferred into another. We need to ask who the advice is for, how people live, what they already know and what will realistically make sense to them.
This changed my original plan. I had initially imagined learning from a successful Swiss model and adapting its resources for Türkiye. I came to understand that adaptation had to be much deeper than translation. When developing my website, I therefore tried to identify gaps specific to Türkiye and speak with schools about what students and parents actually needed.
Unexpectedly, the project also changed how I think about research. In physics, I am used to approaching research primarily through experiments, data, and technical literature. For this project, I had to bring together scientific evidence with education research, ergonomics, culture and lived experience. It made me appreciate that evidence-based work does not always produce one universal answer. Sometimes research tells us what is effective only once we also understand where, for whom and under what circumstances it is being applied.
Most importantly, the LiA gave me the opportunity to put what I had learned into practice. I was no longer only studying a problem; I was responsible for communicating it to real people, listening to what they taught me in return, and using those lessons to build something that could be useful elsewhere.
Reflecting on Laidlaw
Looking back over my two years as a Laidlaw Scholar through the programme’s Three C’s, I do not think I developed equally across all three.
I valued the leadership workshops and the tools they gave me, but having to put those ideas into practice independently through my LiA was something else entirely. It was through having to make decisions, adapt and take responsibility myself that I learned the most about leadership.
Purpose was already one of my strongest character traits when I entered the programme, just as curiosity and determination were already central to how I approached my work. Laidlaw reinforced those qualities, but my greatest growth was in my capacities. It was turning that motivation into responsible and effective action.
Capacities
One of the biggest changes has been in how I approach diversity, equity and inclusion. While developing my earthquake resources, I remember asking myself what a wheelchair user is actually expected to do during an earthquake. It was something I had never properly considered before. I began thinking more deliberately about who might be excluded from standard preparedness advice, and accessibility now has a dedicated place on my website.
I also started considering less obvious barriers to participation. For example, activities can be printed rather than requiring a projector or reliable internet access. Inclusion became less about making something “available to everyone” in theory and more about asking: who might currently be unable to use what I have designed, and why? I realised it’s difficult to step outside my own perspective and think from someone else’s. Yet, particularly when working on a project independently, actively questioning my own assumptions is essential if I want what I create to be genuinely inclusive.
I also entered Laidlaw believing emotional intelligence was already a strength of mine. My LiA showed me that communicating a sensitive subject requires much more deliberate awareness than I had appreciated. Earthquakes can be fascinating scientifically, but for someone who has lost their home or family, the same conversation carries an entirely different meaning. Working across languages and with children, parents, first responders and other members of the public taught me to pay much closer attention to the person in front of me. I had to ask myself how much information is appropriate, how it should be communicated, when to explain and when listening is more important.
Perhaps the most significant change has been in my design thinking and problem-solving. My physics training often encourages me to define a problem precisely and search for the most effective solution. My LiA complicated that instinct in a very useful way. I now find myself asking: effective for whom? In what context? And did people actually ask for this solution in the first place?
Another example shared by the architects made this particularly clear. While working in earthquake-prone communities in Tajikistan, rather than replacing a traditional local construction method with a European one, they first had to understand how people already built their homes and then work with them to make that existing method more earthquake-resistant. The technically possible solution was not necessarily the socially useful one.
Solutions are not always unique, and the technical aspect is only one part of the solution. Listening to the people affected by a problem is itself part of solving it.
My strategy and vision also developed considerably. My LiA began as little more than an idea. I wanted to make earthquake education in Türkiye more practical and memorable. Turning that into something tangible required me to learn about earthquake science, education, ergonomics, cultural adaptation and accessibility; work with people from different disciplines; identify gaps in existing resources; and eventually translate all of that into a website, workshops and a plan for continued development. I became better at taking a broad ambition and breaking it down into something that could be implemented.
The experience also strengthened my communication, critical reflection, research and global citizenship. At CPPS, I interacted with an extraordinary range of people: university students volunteering alongside me, schoolchildren and their parents, police officers, professors, architects who had volunteered in earthquake-affected regions, engineers who designed CPPS’s interactive activities, and even photographers who had documented the 2023 earthquakes in Türkiye. I moved constantly between languages, disciplines, ages and cultural contexts.
When visitors asked questions about Switzerland that I could not answer, I learned to recognise the limits of my knowledge and quickly consult reliable official sources rather than improvise an answer. When different audiences responded differently to the same information, I learned to adapt. When my research exposed assumptions I had made, I learned to question them.
All these capacities ultimately reinforced one another. Better research made me question my assumptions; emotional intelligence made me listen more carefully; listening exposed issues of inclusion; and thinking about inclusion changed how I designed solutions.
Character and Changemaker Values
The change here was subtler. Purpose was already a major part of what motivated me before Laidlaw, while curiosity and determination were already among the Changemaker Values I identified with most strongly. The programme did not create those qualities, but it gave me tools for directing them.
Curiosity has always driven me academically, but Laidlaw encouraged me to take it beyond simply wanting to understand something. Through both my research and LiA, I learned to ask what I could do with what I had learned.
For me, being a changemaker does not necessarily mean having the solution to an enormous problem. It means refusing to let the scale of a problem become a reason for inaction and instead identifying where your own knowledge and skills can genuinely contribute.
If there is one aspect of my character that developed most, it is probably humility. I became more comfortable admitting that I do not understand everything. Leadership can mean arriving with an idea and having the determination to pursue it, but it can equally mean listening, questioning your assumptions and being willing to redesign that idea when someone else understands the context better than you do.
That is probably the most important change Laidlaw has made to how I approach leadership. I still want to act on problems I care about, and my sense of purpose has not diminished. But I now ask more questions before deciding what that action should look like.
Continuing as a global citizen
My understanding of global citizenship has also changed. I once associated it largely with being internationally minded and comfortable across cultures. My LiA taught me that it also means being willing to learn from other communities while recognising that knowledge and solutions cannot always be transferred unchanged between them.
Learning from Switzerland was valuable precisely because I did not try to reproduce its model in Türkiye. Instead, I learned to question what was transferable, what needed to change and how I could work with people in Türkiye to develop something appropriate to their context. I plan to continue this process by developing the earthquake-education platform through feedback from students, parents and teachers and delivering workshops in Türkiye.
For me, being a global citizen now means learning across disciplines and cultures, recognising the limits of my own perspective, and using what I learn to contribute responsibly.
I want to carry this into my scientific career. Whatever direction my research takes, I want education and public engagement to remain part of how I contribute. Education gives people agency: informed people can understand risks, ask better questions, know their rights, identify responsibility and challenge apathy rather than assuming that nothing can change.
I want to remain not only a scientist, but also a lifelong educator and active citizen: someone who listens, communicates knowledge clearly and uses the opportunities and expertise I gain to understand problems and help others act on them.