Mehmet Ali Erkan is a PhD researcher and Research and Teaching Assistant in the Department of Statistics at Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Türkiye. His research combines statistical methodology with modern artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on statistically valid inference from large language models, uncertainty quantification, natural language processing, legal AI, information retrieval and the evaluation of efficient and reliable machine-learning systems.

His work spans both methodological and applied research. Current areas include calibration and risk control for model-generated evidence, conformal and prediction-powered inference, Turkish and low-resource legal NLP, retrieval-augmented generation, benchmark construction, time-series methods and energy-aware evaluation of NLP systems.

Education

Ph.D. in Statistics

Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Türkiye
September 2025 – present
Advisor: Prof. Dr. Ceylan Yozgatlıgil

M.Sc. in Statistics

Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Türkiye
September 2023 – August 2025
GPA: 3.86/4.00
Thesis: Turkish Legal NLP: A Comprehensive AI Framework for Legal Document Understanding, Summarization, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Advisor: Prof. Dr. Ceylan Yozgatlıgil

B.Sc. in Statistics

Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Türkiye
September 2019 – July 2023
GPA: 3.45/4.00

Previous Experience

• Project Intern — Presidency of the Republic of Türkiye, Ankara (May–September 2023): model validation and development, applied machine learning, and interactive dashboards in R Shiny.
• Data Science Intern — Yapı Kredi, Istanbul (May–September 2022): PL/SQL-based data analysis and marketing analytics projects.