Upon her graduation from IHEID in Geneva, Switzerland (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies) back in 2013, Ms. Pala was successfully accepted into the Facility for Euro-Mediterranean Investment and Partnership Program (FEMIP) at the European Investment Bank (EIB) in Luxembourg. She worked on large-scale infrastructure projects (in excess of EUR 25 Million) financed by the EIB and provided policy and engagement backup on EIB’s initiatives on Employment, Renewable Energy, Transportation, Meso-Finance, Brain Gain and Democratic Transition in the North Africa. Subsequently, she started working on aquaculture in her home country. She built the business development team for her company, which has grown exponentially with a revenue of $11M in Turkey in five years. Ms. Pala was shortlisted by Science’s Po special program in Paris “Women of the Mediterranean: The next generation of leaders” in 2015.

In 2016, Ms. Pala moved to San Francisco. After taking classes on artificial intelligence from Stanford University, she has grown more interest in technology and innovation. She decided to combine her background in public policy with technology and wanted to pursue a career path in public policy at hi-tech companies. She won various grants and got involved in several projects ranging from climate change, digital education, animal welfare, income inequality and access to education. Her work with Stanford University’s climate change project has gained publicity since its publication in a well-known newspaper in Turkey.

Ms. Pala also worked for a top 100 artificial intelligence start-up Iris Automation in San Francisco, which builds collision avoidance systems for autonomous drones. Along with the top hi-tech companies such as Google Wing and Amazon Prime, she represented Iris Automation in Small Unmanned Aircraft Vehicles Coalition meetings. During her diploma program at UC Berkeley, she started working for Transportation Sustainability Research Center (TSRC) of UC Berkeley and she collaborated with the research group of TSRC on the legal and regulatory assessment for the potential of urban air mobility (UAM) and on the study on mobility on demand and automated driving systems: a framework for public sector assessment.

In September 2019, Ms. Pala co-founded her own company EgeYem in Izmir, Turkey. Recently, she worked for Policy Initiatives team at Spin Electric Scooters (Ford Mobility). She participated in the Paris and Lyon launch of Spin and presented key findings on the sustainability policy to senior management to inform key business decisions and she has been writing articles on innovative mobility (micromobility and autonomous drones), some of which were published by Diplo Foundation in Geneva and Baslangic Noktasi in Istanbul. Ms. Pala presented various research projects on sustainable transportation at international public policy conferences such as APPAM (Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management) and IPPA (International Public Policy Association). As a keen advocate of sustainable transportation, she is now leading the public policy team at AmpUp, which is a hi-tech start up in San Francisco Bay Area, which builds peer to peer networks for electric vehicles. Ms. Pala has lived in six different countries until now and she can speak seven languages.