Dr Samet Senel

Dr Şenel graduated in 2015 with a BA in Theology from Marmara University, Istanbul. He completed his MA at Sakarya University in 2018 with a thesis on translation activity in the Umayyad period (661–750), and his PhD at the same institution in 2022 with a dissertation entitled Translation Activities in the Islamic World until the Caliph al-Ma'mūn. Both were supervised by Professor Levent Öztürk.

He was appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Islamic History at Trabzon University in February 2023, and has served since February 2024 as a member of the University's Rectorate Quality Commission. His first monograph, Fetihten Bilime: Antik Bilimlerin İslām Dünyasına İntikali (661–750) [From Conquest to Science: The Transmission of the Ancient Sciences to the Islamic World], appeared with Siyer Publishing in Istanbul in 2021.

During his fellowship, Dr Şenel is working on Recovering a Neglected Phase: Medical Developments in the Umayyad Period (661–750) Through al-Rāzī's al-Ḥāwī. The project reconstructs the medical knowledge of Umayyad-era physicians from the citations preserved in al-Rāzī's al-Ḥāwī, reading these alongside pharmacological compendia and biographical dictionaries and analysing them with digital methods including thematic coding, network analysis and data visualisation. It aims to clarify how Hippocratic and Galenic material, together with Syriac, Persian and Indian medical heritage, was received and reworked before the Abbasid translation movement.