Özgür Çizer graduated from fine arts (sculpture) at Mimar Sinan and Marmara University in Istanbul (1993-1998) and studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts (ceramics) in Stuttgart/Germany prior to her Magister Artium education in Archaeology, Geology and History of Arts (2001-2007) at the Eberhard-Karls University of Tübingen/Germany, with a special focus on Zooarchaeology and Archaeobotany of the Eastern Mediterranean. She continued her research with projects in zooarchaeology and archaeobotany during her doctoral studies (2008-2015) and published her doctoral thesis as a monograph in BAR International Series in 2015 with the Titel “Archaeobotanical investigations of plant cultivation and husbandry practices at the Early Bronze Age settlement Küllüoba in West-Central Turkey: Considerations on environment, climate and economy”.
She gained work experience during and after her education in Turkey and Germany in different fields of social and life sciences; like working as restaurateur at historical buildings (1996-1998), as co-organiser of the “International Ceramics Symposium of Izmir, Turkey”, Dokuz Eylül University, Ceramic Department, Izmir, Turkey (1997-2002), as 3D-Modeller with the project “Troia VR”, 3D Reconstruction of antique Troy as “Virtual Reality” at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, (2001-2003), as lecturer for fine arts and Turkish language at the State-supported School for Adult Education (VHS Tübingen 2001-2017), as lecturer for environmental archaeology and archaeometry at the University of Tübingen (since 2015) and as researcher for the companies of the biotechnology in Germany (2016-2018).
Since 2016 she is the leading archaeobotanist for numerous Turkish archaeological sites; Yeşilova and Yassıtepe Höyük (Izmir), Maydos Kilisetepe (Dardenelles), Soli Höyük (Mersin) and as a collaborator with the Austrian Academy of Sciences/Austrian Archaeological Institute Vienna/Austria, she works on the wood charcoal remains from Limyra (Antalya). In collaboration with the experienced archaeobotanist Dr. Evi Margaritis from the Cyprus Institute, in scope of the RPF funded project "URBAN: the antecedents of urbanization in Europe", she is currently working on the archaeobotanical remains from the EBA Settlements of the Cycladic Islands Keros and Dashkalio. Her research interests are focused on the understanding the cultivation process of cereals, grape and olive using geometric morphometrics, analyses of chemical compounds of the medicinal plants found in the archaeological contexts and environmental and climate reconstruction of prehistorical and historical landscapes, woodland management and procurement strategies of the past human populations in Eastern Mediterranean with the integration of the stable carbon, nitrogen and strontium isotopes as multi-proxy studies.
