Dr. Ümit Namli was born in Turkey in 1974. Between 1992 and 1996 he studied at the Department of Security Studies at the Turkish National Police Academy and after graduating he began working in the organized crime unit. Throughout his career he has been a member of a number of different task forces in various countries and worked with different law enforcement agencies. After having worked in this capacity for several years, Dr. Namli was awarded a scholarship by the Turkish Ministry of the Interior in order to pursue a masters’ degree in the US. In 2008 he graduated from the University of Balitmore with a Master in Criminal Justice. Following that, Dr. Namli went to the United Kingdom and pursued a doctoral degree within the Government & International Affairs program at Durham University where he graduated with his PhD in 2013. In his dissertation, Dr. Namli focused on criminological theory with a special focus on social control theory. Between 2000 and 2016 Dr. Namli also worked as Non-Resident Instructor at the Turkish National Academy Against Drugs and Organized Crime (TADOC), which was initiated and supported by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Dr. Namli participated in various projects with EU member countries in order to facilitate the transition of Turkey in terms of EU membership criteria in the areas of justice and security. He did so on behalf of the international project coordinator and the director of the Turkish Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug addiciton which is the respective liaison of the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addicition (EMCDDA).

In 2020, Dr. Namli was awarded a scholarship within the Philipp Schwartz Initiative of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and since August 2020 he is a guest researcher at the Institute of Criminology and the Chair of Criminology, Criminal Law and Sanctions Law of Prof. Dr. Jörg Kinzig. Dr. Namli conducts research on organized crime in general, the structure of organized crime groups and he analyzes social networks of organized crime groups. During his stay at the Institute of Criminology his research explicitly focuses on the structure of organized crime groups in Germany and on how to improve law enforcement agencies’ investigation tactics in the context of organized crime.