During her doctoral studies she worked as a Fulbright FLTA Fellow in the US for a year. Upon completion of her doctoral studies at METU, she pursued postdoctoral research at the University of Warwick (UK) as a TÜBİTAK fellow.

Her research explores how people use language in different social, cultural, and institutional contexts, with a focus on discourse analysis, socio-pragmatics, corpus linguistics, and sociolinguistics. She has investigated topics such as classroom interaction, (im)politeness, intercultural and workplace communication, identity and gender, social media and online discourse, and the role of English as a medium of instruction (EMI) in higher education. Her work combines theory with data-driven approaches, often drawing on large corpora of spoken and written language to uncover how interactional practices are shaped across diverse settings. She has published extensively in international journals such as Journal of Pragmatics, Intercultural Pragmatics, Discourse, Context & Media, Journal of Politeness Research, Australian Review of Applied Linguistics and Linguistics and Education, as well as in edited volumes with Routledge, De Gruyter, and Peter Lang (see https://blog.metu.edu.tr/hisik/publications/).

Dr. Işık-Güler is the founder and research lead of the Discourse and Corpus Research Group (DISCORE) at METU. The group’s interests and academic work span spoken and written corpora, critical discourse analysis, conversation analysis, identity construction, and intercultural pragmatics, with a special emphasis on English, Turkish and multilingual contexts. By creating an active research community, DISCORE supports interdisciplinary projects and helps train the next generation of linguists in both methodological and theoretical innovation (discore.metu.edu.tr). She also leads the METU-EMI Research Network, which was established under DISCORE to investigate English Medium Instruction practices in Turkish higher education and beyond. The Network’s flagship initiatives include the English Medium Instruction Corpus (EMIC), the English Medium Instruction Gesture Sub-Corpus (EMIGeCo), and the EMI Training for Faculty (EMIT4F) program. These projects aim to generate evidence-based insights into classroom practices, provide professional development opportunities for faculty members in non-anglophone contexts, and inform institutional language policy in multilingual and internationalized educational environments (emi.metu.edu.tr). To date, she has advised over 20 graduate students in completing their PhD dissertations and MA theses in these respective fields.

In addition to her teaching and research, Dr. Işık-Güler has coordinated and contributed to a range of large-scale national (MEB-Ministry of Education, TDK-Turkish Language Association, etc.) and international projects. These include initiatives on building spoken and written corpora of Turkish and English, examining professional and institutional communication in real-world contexts, and developing frameworks for English-medium instruction. Many of these projects have been carried out in collaboration with partner universities in Türkiye and abroad (the UK, China and Japan etc.), combining methodological rigor with outcomes that support both scholarship and practice.

During her career, Dr. Işık-Güler has also contributed to university leadership. She served as the Vice Dean of the Faculty of Education and also later as Advisor to the Rector for International Collaborations and Internationalization at METU. In this capacity, she was responsible for shaping the university’s internationalization strategy, managing mobility flows via the International Cooperations Office, and overseeing Erasmus+ and other mobility and exchange programs for students, faculty, and staff as the Erasmus+ Institutional Coordinator. She also managed the university’s International Joint Degree Programs, aligning global partnerships with institutional goals and strengthening METU’s international academic profile. This role allowed her to combine her expertise in intercultural communication and higher education with institutional strategy and policy-making.

Through her teaching, mentoring, and leadership in collaborative projects, Dr. Işık-Güler contributes to strengthening interdisciplinary and international dialogue on language, discourse, and education. Through her work under FabuLAB at ODTÜ Teknokent, she aims to further bridge academic knowledge with practice, supporting inclusive, effective, and sustainable approaches to language use and education.