Dr. Özden Gür Ali joined Koç University in 2004 after ten years of global analytical consulting experience with GE and Fortune 100 companies in marketing, sales, productivity and quality. Most recently at ZS Associates she was consulting health care/ pharmaceutical clients in sales and marketing strategy and operations. Prior to ZS, Özden was with General Electric Research and Development where she worked with GE businesses such as Plastics, Medical Systems, NBC and Capital on projects using  data mining and quality (Six Sigma) methods.  She also trained and evaluated Black Belts as part of GE's Six Sigma effort.

Özden received her B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Boğaziçi University in 1989.  She holds an M.S. in Industrial and Management Engineering (1990), and a Ph.D. in Decision Sciences and Engineering Systems from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She received the "Doçent" title from Turkish higher education council (YÖK) in 2006.

Her current research focus is data mining and predictive modeling in retail. Özden develops modeling approaches that are tailored to specific problems, such as SKU demand forecasting in the presence of promotions, prediction and optimization for cross selling, and predicting customer churn. Specifically, her research entails combining learning techniques (ensembles), feature generation/ selection, training data generation/ selection to achieve accurate, interpretable and adaptive models. Özden manages research and development projects with companies from retail and banking. She also has research on pharmaceutical marketing focusing on incentives in the Turkish and US payment systems.

She teaches Quantitative Methods, Management Science, Project Management, Forecasting, New Venture Development and Quality Management courses in BA and MBA programs.