Tuba Bircan is a research professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), where she directs the Brussels Institute for Social and Population Studies (BRISPO) and leads the AIMS Lab on AI, Migration and Society.

An interdisciplinary computational social scientist, her research spans migration, social inequalities, and public policy, with a strong focus on integrating Big Data and AI into the study of socio-political challenges.

She led the H2020 HumMingBird project on innovative migration measurement and currently co-leads the CLIMB project on climate-induced mobility, in addition to several national initiatives.

A committed advocate of open and societally engaged science, she is the lead editor for "Data Technologies & Analytics for Policy and Governance” area at Data & Policy Journal, while also serving on the editorial boards of Journal of Computational Social Science, Nature Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, PLOS ONE, and Frontiers in Human Dynamics, and on the ethics board of the AI Excellence Centre of the Flemish Employment Agency.

Her publications centre on ethically and socially responsible use of AI, social data science, methodological advances in migration research, and inclusive policy design.