Melike Şah Direkoğlu was born on 3rd of April, 1982, in Nicosia. She graduated from Turkish Maarif College in 1999. She received Master degree (2005) and Bachelor degree (2003) in Computer Engineering from Eastern Mediterranean University with High Honour. In 2005, to continue her PhD education, she went to UK. In 2009, she received Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from University of Southampton. Her Ph.D. was on Semantic Web and Adaptive Hypermedia Systems. After completing her PhD, she moved to Ireland, to work as a post-doctoral researcher at Trinity College Dublin. In 2010, she won a prestigious early career post-doctoral fellowship award from Irish Research Council for her research on personalized search and exploration on the Linked Open Data. As a consequence, she received IRCSET EMPOWER postdoctoral fellowship title. She continued to work as a research fellow at Trinity College Dublin until August 2014. During this period, she worked in diverse research projects, organized national/international workshops and presented her work in numerous international venues. In October 2014, she joined Near East University as a full-time faculty.

Ms. Direkoglu, has published 5 journal articles, 14 conference papers and a national journal article. She has publications in the top ranking journals and conferences as a lead author, such as in JWS, IJSWIS, ESWC, Hypertext, CIKM, AH and WWW. Her research interests are Semantic Web, Linked Data, Social Media, Adaptive Hypermedia Systems, Personalization, Information Retrieval and Mobile Web Applications.

Melike Şah Direkoğlu is married to Cem Direkoğlu and a mother of a daughter.