Şeyma Kara Is Building a New Bridge Between Psychology, Research and Social Impact
The psychology researcher, founder and future PhD candidate believes mental health research should not remain inside universities. It should reach the communities that need it most.
Şeyma Kara never had a fixed childhood dream.
She did not grow up imagining one particular job, title or professional identity.
Instead, she read.
She was a bookworm who was less interested in what happened in a story than in why it happened. She was drawn to the people inside books… their emotional conflicts, strange behaviours, moral dilemmas and the parts of their personalities that did not immediately make sense.
Long before she understood what academic research was, she was already trying to understand the human mind.
“I was interested in research long before I had any idea what academic research was,” she says.
Today, Kara is a psychology researcher, instructor, coordinator, founder and incoming PhD candidate at Sabancı University in Türkiye.
Her work explores resilience, mental toughness, psychological well-being and the gap between academic research and community practice.
Looking back, she believes her younger self would not be surprised by the direction her life has taken.
“She already had an eye turned inward herself,” Kara says. “What would possibly thrill her is not the direction, but the fact that the path actually got built.”
That path has taken her from Istanbul to London and Newcastle, from civil society organisations to academic research, and from asking questions about individual behaviour to thinking about national well-being systems.
At the centre of her work is one persistent question:
Why does valuable psychological knowledge so often fail to reach the people who need it most?
A Family That Separated Effort From Outcome
Kara describes her family as the most important influence on her character.
But it was not one specific lesson or dramatic childhood event that shaped her.
It was the emotional climate of her home.
Achievement and failure were both treated with balance.
A graduation, international recognition or another achievement might be acknowledged warmly, but never turned into a grand spectacle. Failure was approached in much the same way. It was not treated as a verdict on someone’s worth.
Her family used a Turkish expression:
“Nazar boncuğu olsun.”
The phrase suggests that an imperfection among many successes can act like a protective charm… something that prevents perfectionism from taking over.
This philosophy shaped Kara’s relationship with ambition.
She learned to hold herself to a high standard of effort without attaching her value as a person to the final result.
Her mother played a central role in creating that balance.
She valued good intentions, morality and responsibility more than academic achievement. She could maintain structure and expectations while also recognising when rest was needed.
Kara remembers her mother entering her room and saying, “You have worked so much today. Take a break.”
Her brother also became one of her earliest mentors.
They would work late into the night at a large kitchen table, discussing life, meaning, psychological theories and how those theories appeared in everyday situations.
“He is, in a sense, my first mentor,” she says.
Those conversations encouraged Kara to think widely, question established assumptions and search for alternative routes when a plan did not work.
She now describes this upbringing as an effort-compassion relationship.
She expects serious effort from herself, but she does not treat an unsuccessful outcome as proof of personal failure.
That principle also influences how she leads.
She tries to separate a setback from the person experiencing it. Instead of treating failure as a character flaw, she asks what circumstances, pressures or systems produced the outcome.
This mindset is particularly important in academia and mental health, where achievement can easily become tied to identity.
After setbacks, Kara looks for alternative paths.
After achievements, she quickly turns her attention towards the next horizon.
The Literature Assignment That Opened a Door
Kara’s interest in psychology became clearer when she was around 15 years old.
Her literature teacher rarely gave ordinary assignments.
One task required students to create a detailed portrait of a fictional character… one that would allow a reader to understand the character immediately.
That semester, the class had been reading Crime and Punishment.
Kara chose Raskolnikov.
She became absorbed in analysing his psychology, his moral conflict and the effect of his physical environment on his internal world.
After reading the assignment, her teacher arrived with a printed academic article.
She told Kara that researchers were studying Raskolnikov’s psychology in the same way she had approached the character.
Until then, Kara did not know that psychology existed as a research-based scientific discipline.
She read the article and became fascinated by the idea that a person’s environment could influence behaviour beneath conscious awareness.
“I felt like a door swung open,” she says.
For the first time, she recognised a field in which she could imagine belonging.
Before the Awards, She Was a First-Generation Student Asking Questions
Before the scholarships, international opportunities and research projects, Kara was a first-generation university student studying psychology.
She was also uncertain about what would come next.
Clinical psychology or social psychology?
Academia or practice?
She describes herself at that stage as a “habitual questioner.”
She did not accept the existing arrangement of things as the only possible one.
Each semester, she assessed how much time and energy she would have beyond her academic courses. She then searched for projects, conversations, organisations and opportunities that could help her understand the wider world of psychology.
She was also naturally drawn to connecting people.
She introduced individuals and organisations that might benefit from working together, often before she fully understood the long-term significance of those relationships.
One of her closest early collaborators was a retired woman leading a small civic association near her university.
Together, they developed advocacy projects, exchanged ideas and remained in contact after Kara graduated.
Through one of the association leader’s announcements, Kara discovered the organisation now known as the Aspire Institute.
Years later, she would return to the institute as a project coordinator.
For Kara, opportunities have often emerged through relationships that initially seemed unexpected.
“You realise this only when you look back,” she says.
Thirty Emails and One Life-Changing Reply
In 2019, Kara travelled abroad for the first time through the fully funded Educ8 Project in London.
While there, she decided she wanted to connect with university researchers.
Her English was not yet fluent, and she was not sure what she would ask if anyone agreed to meet her.
Still, she emailed more than 30 academics across London.
Most did not respond.
One did.
A faculty member invited Kara to spend an entire day at the Addiction Department at King’s College London.
She attended research meetings, listened to funding discussions and observed the everyday rhythms of academic life.
She understood only parts of the conversations, but the experience changed what she believed was possible.
At the time, Kara was a 19-year-old psychology student from a middle-class university in Istanbul.
She had never seen that level of academic engagement or research culture.
Sitting inside the department, she thought:
“We do not do this at my university. I have never seen such an engagement. This kind of space does not exist for someone like me.”
Then she made herself a promise.
She would find similar environments, learn from them and build a path into the kind of work where she felt she belonged.
The academic who welcomed her may never have realised the impact of that invitation.
But Kara still remembers it as a moment when a previously distant world became real.
The Pandemic Changed Her Trajectory
Kara identifies the COVID-19 pandemic as the most significant turning point in her life.
She does not describe the pandemic itself as fortunate.
It was a period of uncertainty, disruption and loss.
However, it also removed a geographical barrier that had limited her access to academic and professional opportunities.
At the time, she was studying psychology at her university’s Şile campus, around two hours from central Istanbul.
The campus was beautiful but isolated.
Internships, clinical placements, projects at other universities and professional collaborations were difficult to access alongside a full academic schedule.
When education and work moved online, that barrier suddenly weakened.
During her final university year, Kara studied full-time while also working full-time online.
She completed two bachelor’s theses, led two research projects through internships and later became a project coordinator at a national civil society organisation.
These experiences did not happen one after another.
They happened simultaneously.
She was learning as a student, beginner researcher, operational employee and project leader at the same time.
The pandemic also changed the wider conversation around mental health.
Governments, universities, funders and organisations began to treat well-being, resilience and prevention as social and economic priorities rather than secondary concerns.
“The world, in many respects, caught up with the questions psychologists had been asking for years,” Kara says.
Her personal interests and the world’s priorities were suddenly moving in the same direction.
Choosing Where Her Work Could Create the Most Value
Like many early-career academics, Kara once believed that going abroad was the natural next step.
After her experience in the UK, she seriously considered building her academic career outside Türkiye.
There was also a practical concern.
Remaining in one country can sometimes feel as though it may narrow future academic opportunities.
But Kara gradually began questioning the assumption.
She asked herself whether she genuinely wanted to leave or whether she was simply following the expected route.
Eventually, she realised she had been asking the wrong question.
Instead of asking, “Where can I build the strongest academic career?” she began asking:
“Where can my work create the most value?”
The research problems that motivate her are closely connected to Türkiye.
They include the need for culturally grounded mental health interventions, stronger links between research and practice, and more sustainable psychological support systems.
Being close to the context where those problems exist is not, in her view, an academic limitation.
It can be a scientific advantage.
Her international experiences helped her reach that conclusion.
Living and studying in the UK broadened her perspective, but it also allowed her to see Türkiye more clearly.
She no longer views international experience as something that must lead to permanent migration.
Sometimes, she says, the purpose is to return with better questions, stronger methods and a wider frame of reference.
“I used to think ambition and success meant being able to join the strongest existing systems and institutions,” she says. “Now I think it can also mean helping build the systems that do not yet exist.”
The Story LinkedIn Does Not Show
Kara’s LinkedIn profile presents a period of considerable professional momentum.
It shows research projects, publications, academic degrees, collaborations and international experiences.
But it does not show everything.
During some of the most productive years of her career, Kara was also dealing with private challenges, health difficulties and major decisions about the kind of life she wanted to build.
“The visible professional momentum and the invisible physical and personal friction were happening at the exact same time,” she says.
This experience taught her that people often live several stories simultaneously.
Professional progress does not mean personal life is easy.
A visible achievement may exist beside an invisible struggle.
For Kara, this is one of the limits of professional social media.
It captures milestones but rarely reveals the trade-offs, uncertainty or private resilience behind them.
Newcastle, Chevening and the Psychology of Opportunity
Kara completed a master’s degree at Newcastle University as a Chevening Scholar.
While living the international student experience, she was also researching international students’ mental toughness, academic engagement, burnout and acculturative stress.
This gave her a dual perspective.
She was studying the experience while living inside it.
The scholarship gave her funding and access, but she came to understand that a scholarship is more than a financial arrangement.
It is also a psychological event.
Being selected creates a new identity.
The recipient may feel expected to represent a community, justify the investment and demonstrate future potential.
A scholarship brings relief, but it can also introduce pressure.
Her research suggested that scholarship students were not necessarily protected from burnout.
“Being selected changes the struggles you have,” Kara says. “It does not remove them.”
The experience brought out some of her strongest qualities while also asking a great deal from her.
It taught her that funding creates psychological room to focus, learn and participate… but recognition also changes the way people interpret themselves and the way others perceive them.
Learning That Impact Does Not Always Require Scale
At Newcastle University Students’ Union, Kara worked as a research intern analysing nominations submitted for the annual Education Awards.
Each year, students nominated members of staff who had positively influenced their education.
Instead of allowing those reflections to disappear after the ceremony, the Students’ Union treated them as evidence.
A researcher was recruited to analyse the data and produce findings that could inform educational practice.
Kara took on that role.
She introduced comparisons across previous years, developed thematic profiles of the qualities students consistently valued in educators and created the first video summary of the report.
The experience changed how she thought about impact.
A modest annual event with limited resources could still generate meaningful institutional learning.
“Impact is not necessarily a function of scale,” she says. “It is often a function of whether we choose to learn systematically from the experiences we are already creating.”
She encountered a similar principle through the NHS Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme, now known as NHS Talking Therapies.
The programme demonstrated how evidence-based psychological support could be delivered differently to reach more people.
For Kara, this raised an important question:
Could similar low-intensity and evidence-based approaches help address barriers to mental health support in Türkiye?
This idea of creating “micro-impact” through thoughtful redesign remains central to her work.
Why Research and Practice Must Meet
Kara believes research that remains inside universities only completes half of its purpose.
Not every study needs an immediate delivery plan.
Some questions are valuable because they expand knowledge.
But in mental health, researchers are often studying people who are struggling and could potentially benefit from the findings.
“If a finding never reaches the person it could help, I do not think its value has been realised,” she says.
However, Kara is equally concerned about the opposite problem.
Practice without research can drift.
Civil society projects may follow what is fundable or easy to report rather than what has been shown to work.
Well-intentioned programmes can fail quietly because they were never properly tested or aligned with the people they were designed to support.
The research side has its own weaknesses.
Studies may rely on convenient samples that do not represent those facing the most serious difficulties.
Findings may be developed in another language, another culture or another social context.
For Kara, research and practice should operate as a continuous loop.
Practice identifies real problems.
Research disciplines the search for answers.
The findings return to practice, where they are tested and improved.
The challenge is structural.
Academic promotion often rewards publication more than social impact.
Civil society organisations frequently lack the time, funding and technical capacity to collaborate with researchers.
The gap, Kara argues, is not caused by a lack of care.
It exists because no system consistently holds the two sides together.
Measuring Türkiye’s Psychological Well-Being
Kara contributed to Türkiye’s first independent psychological well-being report through the Istanbul Policy Center.
Before the report, national conversations often relied on broad international rankings such as the World Happiness Report, the OECD Better Life Index and the Legatum Prosperity Index.
These rankings offered useful comparisons, but they did not always explain Türkiye’s specific social and cultural context.
The report brought together international indices and national data, interpreting them across social, economic and cultural conditions.
For Kara, the project mattered because it transformed private and diffuse experiences into measurable evidence.
Widespread anxiety, exhaustion, insecurity and the erosion of joy could be discussed as shared social realities rather than only individual problems.
Several findings stood out to her.
The first was the weakening of social trust.
People continued to trust close family members, while trust in wider society had fallen significantly.
The close circle remained strong, but the social world outside it had become thinner.
The second was the gap between material conditions and subjective well-being.
Improved infrastructure or living conditions did not automatically lead to people feeling better about their lives.
The third was the erosion of positive emotion.
The problem was not only increasing distress.
It was also a decline in curiosity, enjoyment, motivation and the desire to move towards new experiences.
Kara sees mental well-being as an early-warning signal for society.
It should not be understood only through individual diagnosis or treatment.
Medication may play an important role, but it cannot resolve social distrust, chronic insecurity or the loss of collective hope.
The Question Behind Her Research
Kara’s research on resilience and mental toughness began with a deceptively simple question:
Why do people respond differently to similar pressures?
Some struggle.
Some remain stable.
Others appear to grow through adversity.
She wanted to understand whether the interaction between personality, environment, opportunity and psychological capacity could be systematically modelled.
Resilience first captured her interest.
Later, while studying in the UK, she encountered the concept of mental toughness.
Resilience is often described as the ability to recover and return to a previous level of functioning.
Mental toughness can also involve interpreting difficulty as an opportunity and developing through challenge.
Kara had observed this quality among first-generation students, young people outside education and employment, emerging adults and people from rural communities.
She was also interested in its practical potential.
Mental toughness includes psychological resources such as control, commitment, emotional regulation and the ability to view challenges constructively.
Unlike some more stable personality characteristics, it can change through experience and intervention.
This makes it actionable.
For Kara, that matters.
She is not only interested in understanding why people respond differently to adversity.
She wants to identify what can realistically be strengthened.
A PhD Designed to Move Beyond Measurement
Kara’s PhD will focus on resilience, mental toughness and evidence-based intervention.
Her previous master’s research helped establish a measurement foundation.
Her PhD aims to move from assessing mental toughness to understanding how it can intentionally be developed.
She plans to begin with a systematic review of interventions related to mental toughness, resilience, self-efficacy, optimism and grit.
Building on that evidence, she hopes to develop an online mental toughness intervention using a randomised controlled design.
Rather than giving every participant the same programme, the intervention would be tailored to different psychological profiles.
Participants could receive exercises that reflect their existing strengths and developmental needs.
Kara hopes to focus particularly on first-generation university students and young people who are not in education, employment or training.
These groups often face overlapping psychological and structural barriers.
Her goal is to collaborate with NGOs, community organisations and public employment agencies so that the intervention is tested in real-world environments.
Even a modest improvement could matter at scale.
A young person who remains in education or enters employment may experience psychological and financial benefits that extend to their family and community.
For Kara, success would mean the intervention moving beyond academic publication.
She wants it to become something that organisations can realistically use.
Why She Founded EaseTogether
EaseTogether emerged from Kara’s years of experience working with civil society organisations.
She repeatedly saw projects producing valuable information that was never properly monitored, standardised or analysed.
In low-resource environments, this created a double loss.
Organisations lost opportunities to improve their work, and scarce funding was spent without a clear understanding of impact.
Kara also saw very little meaningful dialogue between universities, NGOs, healthcare providers and community organisations.
The gap frustrated her for years.
EaseTogether began conceptually in 2021 as a consultancy idea for NGOs delivering well-being projects.
The original goal was to help organisations integrate stronger evidence and evaluation into their work.
The idea received seed funding from the Aspire Institute.
Kara then began contacting people working across academia and civil society.
She emailed professionals one by one and asked them to share their experiences.
Around 15 to 20 people responded.
The conversations changed her understanding of the problem.
NGOs often did not want long-term capacity-building while managing active projects and reporting deadlines.
They needed practical insights they could use immediately.
Some received technical academic reports they could barely interpret but submitted them because funders required documentation.
Evidence was being produced for the reporting process rather than for the work itself.
Academics faced different barriers.
Fieldwork required considerable time and energy.
The result was not always publishable, and collaboration with busy organisations could be difficult to sustain.
Both sides were responding rationally to what their systems rewarded.
Kara realised that EaseTogether needed to begin with awareness, accessibility and dialogue.
It became a small learning space where academics, NGO leaders, managers, volunteers, interns and community members could share practical knowledge.
The pilot intentionally remained limited.
Around 80 professionals from approximately 25 institutions took part.
The goal was not rapid growth.
It was validation and learning.
For Kara, the most rewarding moment came when people from different sectors began sharing not only expertise, but also uncertainty, operational problems and practical dilemmas.
“That kind of practical knowledge rarely gets published,” she says.
The experience confirmed that people do want to collaborate across professional boundaries when the right conditions exist.
The Long-Term Vision: A Do-Tank
Kara does not want EaseTogether to remain only an online learning programme.
Her long-term vision is to develop it into a university-affiliated, lab-based consultancy institute.
She describes the model as a “do-tank.”
The institute would bring together research, training and community practice.
Master’s and PhD students could receive supervision while working directly with NGOs, public institutions and community organisations.
Research questions would emerge from real needs.
Evidence would return quickly to practice.
The institute could also provide consultancy and capacity-building for organisations delivering mental health and well-being projects.
Rather than treating academia, fieldwork and training as separate worlds, EaseTogether would connect them through everyday work.
For Kara, success would not simply mean building a larger organisation.
It would mean making collaboration ordinary.
“If, ten years from now, EaseTogether has become a place where collaboration across academia and practice is no longer the exception but the expectation, I would consider that a meaningful success.”
Leadership as Coordination
Of all the roles Kara has held, she says coordination has taught her the most about leadership.
But she defines leadership more broadly than management.
Leadership can mean opening a pathway, introducing a method, identifying a research question or creating a new possibility for action.
Research itself can be an act of leadership.
Coordination, however, exposed her to the widest range of responsibilities and the most immediate consequences.
At the Aspire Institute, she helped coordinate the development of the Türkiye Foundry.
Her work involved crisis resolution, mentoring, opportunity guidance, programme design, mediation and advocacy.
She worked between international headquarters and a developing Türkiye-based management team.
Different actors had different regulations, expectations, timelines, values and measures of success.
The challenge was rarely to think for one party.
It was to hold several perspectives simultaneously and find a route that could work for all of them.
She also tried to ensure that community needs and lived experience were not lost between institutional limitations, funder priorities and operational demands.
Leadership, in this context, meant finding the point where ideal outcomes and real-world constraints could meet.
Context Is Not Noise
Kara’s international experiences have made her cautious about importing solutions without adaptation.
Her second master’s thesis led to the Turkish adaptation of MTQ-Plus, a comprehensive mental toughness assessment.
The work also became the first psychometric evaluation of the scale in Turkish and the first mental toughness scale outside the sports psychology tradition to be adapted for Türkiye.
The process taught her humility.
A psychological scale cannot simply be translated word for word.
Researchers must ask whether the concept has the same meaning in another culture, whether individual items behave in the same way and whether comparison is scientifically legitimate.
Sometimes, the model does not transfer neatly.
That should not always be treated as failure.
It may be the most important finding.
“Context is not the noise around a finding,” Kara says. “Often, context is the finding.”
She applies the same principle to leadership and social impact.
A model that succeeds in one country or institution may not survive unchanged somewhere else.
Adaptation is not a preliminary step before the real work.
It is part of the real work.
The Deliberate Architecture Behind a Wide-Ranging Career
People sometimes look at Kara’s many roles and assume she is driven by curiosity alone.
From the outside, her career can appear to be a collection of unrelated experiences.
Peers and senior colleagues have occasionally advised her to narrow her focus.
Kara understands the concern.
However, she believes the architecture behind her decisions is often invisible.
She spends considerable time thinking about what an opportunity will cost, what it will teach her and how it connects to a longer-term direction.
Very little is random.
“What can look like restlessness is usually my design,” she says. “I just do not always narrate the logic out loud.”
The researcher, instructor, coordinator and founder are not separate identities.
They are different parts of the same project.
That project is to understand psychological resilience, strengthen the connection between evidence and practice, and build systems that make mental health knowledge more useful and more accessible.
Building What Matters
Twenty years from now, Kara does not want to be remembered only for what she published.
She wants to be remembered for what her work made possible.
She hopes her research will become systems, services and practical interventions that improve people’s lives.
She also wants to demonstrate that rigorous science can remain rooted in its cultural context while contributing to global knowledge.
Her journey began with books, characters and unanswered questions.
It continued through a literature assignment, a courageous email, a day at King’s College London, a scholarship in Newcastle and years of work across research and civil society.
Now she is building a career around a simple but demanding principle:
Knowledge should not stop at the point of discovery.
It should travel.
It should be tested in real communities.
It should return to researchers carrying new questions.
And, ultimately, it should help build something that did not exist before.
“I would much rather be remembered for what was built,” Kara says, “than simply for what was published.”
About Şeyma Kara
Şeyma Kara is a psychology researcher, instructor, project coordinator, founder of EaseTogether and incoming PhD candidate at Sabancı University in Türkiye. Her work focuses on resilience, mental toughness, psychological well-being, evidence-based intervention and the connection between academic research and community practice.
She has studied and worked across Türkiye and the United Kingdom, including completing a master’s degree at Newcastle University as a Chevening Scholar. She has contributed to Türkiye’s first independent psychological well-being report and has worked with civil society organisations, academic institutions and international leadership communities.
Through EaseTogether, she aims to strengthen collaboration between researchers, practitioners, NGOs and communities.