Fahriye Hazer Sancar is professor emerita of Urban and Regional Planning and Environmental Design at CU Boulder.听 Her prior faculty positions were at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh (1974-1976), Marmara Technical and Industrial Research Institute (1977-78), Middle East Technical University (1978-1981), University of Wisconsin-Madison (1981-1994). She arrived at the University of Colorado as a Full Professor in 1995 and has served as Associate Chair and Chair of the department of Planning and Design, worked as the founding member of the Children Youth and Environments Center for Research and Design, as Co-editor of the CYE Journal, on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Urban Design, and reviewer for numerous journals and conferences. She was a grant reviewer for the National Endowment For the Arts and the European Commission and outside reviewer for PhD theses for various universities here and abroad. 听She was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship in 2001. She has been invited to give plenary talks in national and international conferences.
She graduated with a B. Arch. from METU, MS听in Architecture and PhD听in Man-Environment-Relations (with a minor in Anthropology) from The Pennsylvania State University. She was a post-doctoral fellow at Cornell University prior to joining University of Wisconsin. Her specialties are land use and design regulations, active living research, aesthetics and place attachment, heritage preservation and sustainable tourism development. Her funded research and publications have focused on methods for collaborative planning in the context of these substantive areas. She has been active in outreach activities both in the context of her research and in teaching and has engaged in scholarship of teaching and research since her first faculty appointment.听 She has consistently taught in undergraduate, masters and PhD programs and has made significant contributions to curriculum development for all three levels.听 She 听established the longest running study abroad program in the College that involved working with local municipalities and has generated both research and policy outcomes. She has been a major advisor for and committee member for numerous PhD and MS students (her first PhD student retired in 2010 听after a successful career).听 These students have come from different parts of the nation and the world and include those who were originally trained as designers, engineers, or had backgrounds in humanities, sciences or social sciences. She retired in 2011 after 37 years of service in academia and serves as Professor Emerita in Environmental Design at CU Boulder.听