Bio
Burcu Kilic is a CIGI senior fellow and a scholar, strategist and expert in trade and technology policy. She is principal consultant at BKS Ventures, where she advises organizations across civil society, philanthropy and government. She also teaches technology policy and international affairs as a professorial lecturer at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University.
She held fellowships at the Carr-Ryan Center at the Harvard Kennedy School (2024–2025) and the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University (2021–2022), focusing on technology, trade and rights.
She was the head of policy at Frontier Technology, a Minderoo Foundation initiative, where she led the foundation’s strategy on emerging technologies and championed responsible, rights-based innovation. Prior to that, she directed the Digital Rights Program at Public Citizen, a non-profit consumer advocacy organization in Washington, DC, and also led their research on access to medicines.
Her influence in tech policy, intellectual property and trade underscores her commitment to policy entrepreneurship and rights-based advocacy. She champions collaborative civil society engagement, policy entrepreneurship and innovative policy development on a global scale. In 2015, she was recognized as one of the 300 Women Leaders in Global Health for her work on health and trade policy.
She holds a Ph.D. from Queen Mary University of London, along with LL.M. degrees in intellectual property law (Queen Mary) and information technology law (Stockholm University). She earned her law degree from Ankara University, Turkey.