Gülsen Bozkurt

Gülsen Bozkurt
Born	28 September 1950 (age 66)

Gülsen Bozkurt (born 28 September 1950) is a Turkish Cypriot doctor and politician. She served as a member of the parliament between 1993 and 2003 and as the Minister of Health and the Environment between 1999 and 2001. She was one of the first Turkish Cypriot women in politics and the second female minister after Onur Borman.

Gülsen Bozkurt (née Dolmacı) was born in Lapithos on 28 September 1950 as the eldest of the four children of a farmer and a housewife. She started high school at the Kyrenia Anafartalar High School and finished it at the Lefkoşa Türk Lisesi (Nicosia Turkish High School), graduating in 1968. During the intercommunal violence of the 1960s, she and her family had been displaced to North Nicosia, fleeing to the home of her uncle, where they lived.

Bozkurt gained admission to the Faculty of Medicine of Ankara University, from where she graduated in 1974. The 1974 Cypriot coup d'état and the subsequent Turkish invasion of Cyprus occurred when she and her family were in Ankara for her graduation, so they remained stranded there and could only return to the island in August.

Whilst Bozkurt had initially wanted to specialise in dermatology, she then changed her mind to choose paediatrics. She went to Ankara in 1976 for her specialisation. After seeing the effects of thalassaemia in Cyprus, she further specialised in paediatric haematology. In 1984, she returned to Cyprus and became one of the founders of the Centre of Thalassaemia in the Dr. Burhan Nalbantoğlu State Hospital. Between 1984 and 1993, she was part of a team that worked successfully to reduce the number of anaemic births in Northern Cyprus, through a screening programme for beta thalassaemia. These included the introduction of prenatal screening through fetal blood tests in 1984 and the implementation of DNA techniques through chorionic villus sampling in 1991.

...
Wikipedia