Başak Bak is an experienced academic, having worked as a law lecturer for ten years at Ankara University, and as an assistant professor of law for two years at Izmir University of Economics. Prior to this, she was a paralegal in a top-tier international law firm in Istanbul. She has also been an active member of the Istanbul Bar Association, practicing as a legal consultant specialising in intellectual property law, law of contracts and consumer protection.
 
Following her LLB studies, Başak successfully obtained her LLM degree on immovable property and landlord’s hypothec at Ankara University in 2010, followed by her PhD degree (summa cum laude) on intellectual property law in 2015. While she was studying for her PhD degree, she was a visiting scholar at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen for two terms (fully funded), as her doctoral thesis was mainly influenced by the German approach to copyright law. After being awarded her doctoral thesis (without corrections), she obtained an MA degree on UK and US copyright law at King’s College London in order to develop her expertise in the common law world. In 2017, Başak was awarded a grant of £29,000 by the British Council within the framework of the prestigious Newton Fund Researcher Links Workshop Grant to organise an international intellectual property law event based on a proposal she developed. This was impressively the first project awarded in the field of law.
 
At present, Başak is working as a lecturer at the University of Reading and also doing her second PhD on data protection law and genetic privacy, an area of increasing importance, yet underexplored. She has a track record of publications (in Turkish and English) in intellectual property law, law of contracts and legal aspects of artificial intelligence, and she is now publishing more widely on the aspects of data protection law.

Başak is a member of the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP). She is a Certified Information Privacy Manager (CIPM) and Certified Information Privacy Professional/Europe (CIPP/E). She is also an Advance HE Fellow (D2). Başak recently received a prestigious Modern Law Review Scholarship (2021-2022) for her current doctoral research on genetic data privacy and big health data.