Dr. Oezkan received her medical degree from Ruhr University Bochum, Germany in 2008, followed by a doctorate degree in Hepatitis C immunology in 2012. In 2016, she completed her residency and fellowship in Internal Medicine and Pulmonology at Ruhrlandklinik, University Duisburg-Essen, Germany, followed by a board-certificate. Since 2017, she performed postdoctoral research at the Ohio State University under Dr. David P. Carbone’s mentorship. She received funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG) to investigate the nodal, blood and tumor immunophenotypes of resectable stage NSCLC patients receiving neoadjuvant immunotherapy. Her work was awarded by the Conquer Cancer Foundation of ASCO in 2019. In 2021, Dr. Oezkan joined the Faculty of Medicine of Heidelberg University, Germany at the University Hospital Mannheim as an attending pulmonologist and continues to conduct lung cancer immunology research at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ). She also holds an adjunct assistant professor position at the Ohio State University.

I am a volunteer in lung cancer for about 15 years. Primarily I was a lung cancer patient advocate in Poland and since 2012 i started cooperation with other international organisations in Europe. I became the Vice President of LuCE since 2015.
Lung Cancer Europe is a non-profit umbrella organization founded in 2013. We are based in Bern, Switzerland. All of our work is focused directly on European countries.
We aim to act as the voice of lung cancer patients (inclusive mesothelioma and other rare lung cancer types), their families and survivors at a European level. We provide a European platform for already existing groups and want to support the establishment of national lung cancer patient groups in different European countries where such groups do not yet exist. We also want to raise awareness about inequalities regarding the access to lung cancer treatment and care in Europe. We’re aiming at advocacy for European policies that should lead to improvements in lung cancer prevention, early detection, treatment and care (including palliative care). We also want to reduce the stigma associated with lung cancer. We’re aiming to increase European funding allocated to lung cancer research. On every step of the way, lung cancer patients are the most important for us, we try to know their problems and opinions and with that knowledge work as their voice where we are able to in order to improve their quality of life, fight inequalities in access to treatments and organize awareness campaigns which aim at informing the society about the importance of healthy lifestyle and early diagnosis in lung cancer context.