Profile for

Berk Uzun, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor

As an Assistant Professor of Sport Management, I study the place where sport, the environment, and data meet. I explore questions like how sport events shape human mobility, how sport and the natural environment affect each other, and what data, from GPS traces to online reviews, can tell us that surveys alone cannot. Before I became an academic, I spent more than a decade on the other side of the table: inspecting sport venues, auditing federations, and advising public sport agencies. That experience still shapes how I teach. I want my students to see sport as an industry of real budgets, real decisions, and real consequences, not just highlights.

Outside of work, I am a restless traveler. New places, new kitchens, and new ways of doing ordinary things are my favorite kind of education, and that curiosity is a big part of what drew me to studying sport across cultures and borders. Fun fact: my home country, Türkiye, has 81 provinces, and I have visited 78 of them. Now I am working on the 50 states with the same stubbornness.

A Conversation with Dr. Uzun

What do you like most about your career?

Almost all of my research comes back to one simple question: does one shoe fit all? In sport, the answer is usually no. What works for a 100,000-seat stadium may not work for a small-town venue, and what fans say in a survey is not always what they actually do. I love finding data that tests those assumptions. I love it even more when a finding leaves the journal and becomes something a team, a city, or a student can actually use. And no two weeks are the same: one day I am mapping thousands of GPS points, the next I am in class debating why a venue's budget doubled.

What draws you to your discipline?

Sport is a huge industry, but a surprising number of its decisions are still made on instinct, habit, or whoever spoke loudest in the room, not on evidence. That gap is what pulled me in. I came to sport management from civil engineering and then from years in public administration, inspecting sport venues and reviewing how public money was spent on them. I kept running into the same pattern: good people making expensive decisions without the data they needed. Sport management lets me connect industry practice, public administration, and research, and that is exactly where I want to be. When a city, a federation, or a venue has a real question to answer, I would rather hand them evidence they can act on than an opinion.

What has been your favorite course to teach?

Facility and Event Management, without question. It is the course where all three versions of me show up at once: the engineer, the sport administrator, and the researcher. Earlier in my career, I examined a large share of my country's sport facilities and events in detail, from planning and procurement through construction and years of daily use. So when we talk about why a concourse bottlenecks, why a budget doubles, or why a venue built for one event sits empty afterward, I am not just teaching a textbook case. I am describing buildings I have walked through.

I also love teaching anything on the analytics side, because data, technology, and innovation are where the field is moving fastest. Those courses let me answer the question students actually care about: what does data mean in real life, and what is it good for? There is a moment, usually around week six, when a student who swore they were “not a numbers person” gets their first model to run and sits back in their chair. I live for that moment!

Tell us about a project you are currently working on or recently completed.

I recently published a study in the journal Cities that looked at how people used Austin's public bike-share system, MetroBike, on University of Texas football game days. Instead of asking fans how they travel, we used the actual trip records to see how game days change where, when, and how people ride. The question behind it matters for every college town: how do you move tens of thousands of fans in and out of a stadium without adding more cars to the road?

I am currently applying similar thinking to other questions. One project measures the carbon footprint of fans' game-day travel, and another uses natural language processing to analyze thousands of Google reviews of NFL stadiums to understand what makes or breaks the fan experience. I also work with graduate students on projects like these, so they learn research by doing it.

Educational Experience

• Ph.D., Health and Human Performance (Sport Management), University of Florida, 2026
• M.Sc., Public Administration (Disaster Management), Ankara Haci Bayram Veli University, 2020
• B.Sc., Civil Engineering (Hydraulics), Middle East Technical University, 2007

Research Interests

• Sport ecology, sustainability in sport, sport geography, GIS, sport analytics, LLM, big data, AI.

Professional Organizations

• North American Society for Sport Management (NASSM)
• European Association for Sport Management (EASM)
• Applied Sport Management Association (ASMA)
• Sport Ecology Group (SEG)

Select Publications

• Jakar, G. S., McCullough, B. P., Uzun, B. (2026). Environmentally sustainable transportation, micromobility, and large sport events: Bikeshare usage in Austin, Texas. Cities, 179, 107634, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2026.107634.
• Nothen, G., Acaf, Y., O'Sullivan, B., Houlihan, G., Uzun, B., Ross, W. (2025). Sport and climate change: research evidence and emerging concerns. Movimento, 31, p.e31040, https://doi.org/10.22456/1982-8918.144750.