Gonul Colak is a Professor of Accounting and Finance and currently serves as the Head of the Department of Accounting & Finance at the University of Sussex. He also holds a fractional professorship at the Department of Finance at Hanken School of Economics. Recently, he was a visiting scholar at the Turkish Central Bank's Istanbul School of Central Banking in Turkey. Previously, he held academic positions at Florida State University and Wichita State University.

Gonul Colak served as the chairman of the Graduate School of Finance (GSF) in Finland and was a member of the board in the Nordic Finance Network (NFN). He served as the director of the PhD program in finance at Hanken School of Economics. He was also a member of the international advisory board of the Business School of Sebelas Maret University in Indonesia. 
He currently serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Financial Stability and The Financial Review. 
Gonul has publications in high-quality journals such as Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Review of Accounting Studies, Journal of Financial Intermediation, and Journal of Corporate Finance. According to Scopus, his published work has been cited around 1500 times, some of which are in high-impact journals.