Vice President

A. Tanju Erdem received a B.S. degree in electrical and electronics engineering and a B.S. degree in physics in 1986 from Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey. He received an M.S. degree in 1988 and a Ph.D. degree in 1990, both in electrical engineering, from University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, USA. He was a member of the Research Laboratories of Eastman Kodak Company, Rochester, New York, USA, from 1990 to 1998, where he worked on various aspects of image and video processing. He has co-founded, and served until 2009 as the CTO, of Momentum, A.S., a 3D digital media technologies company established in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1998. He has served on the ISO-MPEG committee from 1991 to 1998. He was the Chair of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Turkey Chapter and served as an Associate Editor for Signal Processing: Image Communication during 2010-2014. He joined Özyeğin University in 2009, where he served as Head of the Computer Science Department during 2012-2014 and as Dean of the Engineering Faculty as well as Director of the Graduate School of Engineering and Science during 2014-2018.

M. İrşadi Aksun received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Middle East Technical University and his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1990. Upon completing his Ph.D., he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the same university until 1992. After his postdoctoral training, he joined the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Bilkent University, where he served until 2001. In 2001, Prof. Aksun joined the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Koç University. He served as the Dean of the Faculty of Engineering from 2004 to 2009 and as the Vice President for Research and Development from 2009 to 2021. He has continued to serve as a faculty member in the same department, with his tenure extending until September 2024. Prof. Aksun’s research interests include electromagnetic field theory, computational electromagnetics and optics, optical and RF antennas and propagation, and nano-optics and plasmonics. He has received several prestigious awards, including the “TÜBİTAK Incentive Award” in 1994, “The Best Professor Award” from Bilkent University students in 2001, and the “TÜBİTAK Science Award” in 2007. He was elected as a principal member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences in 2011. He was appointed as Vice President for Research, Innovation and Impact at Özyeğin University as of September 1, 2024.