He was born on December 25, 1983, in the village of Uzakçay, Akdağmadeni district, Yozgat. ÖZALP completed his primary education in his village of birth, and his secondary and high school education in Ankara. At the end of 2004, he went to Austria for higher education. ÖZALP, who has a Turkish immigrant background as his parents lived in Vienna, held various positions in many civil society organizations, especially Turkish civil society organizations, during his years in Vienna. ÖZALP completed his undergraduate and graduate studies in Political Science at the University of Vienna in Austria between 2005 and 2015, and he finished his doctorate in international development at the same university. ÖZALP, who started working as a faculty member at the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences at Yozgat Bozok University in June 2016, served as the director of the Akdağmadeni Vocational School of the same university from 2016 to 2019. ÖZALP is also a founding faculty member of the Department of International Relations at Yozgat Bozok University, which opened in 2016, and he is still working in this department. ÖZALP, who received the title of associate professor in International Relations in 2021, has published four books, two of which are in German, edited two books, one of which is in German, contributed to five book chapters, and published articles in over twenty international peer-reviewed journals. ÖZALP's academic research areas include energy integration in the Turkic world, trade corridors, and transportation diplomacy, as well as the Turkistan region, European energy policies, the Arctic region, energy security, global warming, climate change, and migration. ÖZALP, who speaks German at an academic level, is married and the father of a daughter.