Inspiring Talks
2025-2026 Academic Year
Title: Following The Change
Speaker: Barış Düzgün
Date: 15.10.2025
Speaker Bio:
Mustafa Barış Düzgün graduated from the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Middle East Technical University (METU), where he also completed his master’s degree. He began his career in 1997 at ASELSAN. Within ASELSAN’s Microelectronics, Guidance, and Electro-Optics Division (MGEO), he served successively as Design Engineer, Electronic Design Team Leader, and Electronic Design Manager. In 2018, Düzgün joined DIGITEST Electronics as Deputy General Manager responsible for Business Planning, Human Resources, Quality Management, Contract Management, and R&D. In April 2019, he started working at ASİSGUARD as Director of Engineering and Technology. Since March 2020, Mustafa Barış Düzgün has been serving as the General Manager of ASİSGUARD.
2024-2025 Academic Year
Title: Deep Learning-Enabled Computational Microscopy & Diffractive Imaging
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Aydoğan Özcan
Date: 05.01.2024
Speaker Bio: Prof. Aydoğan Özcan, a faculty member at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, leads the Bio- and Nano-Photonics Laboratory within the UCLA School of Engineering and serves as associate director of the California NanoSystems Institute. He holds 33 issued patents and more than 20 pending patent applications, has authored a book, and published over 450 articles in leading peer-reviewed journals and conferences.
Prof. Dr. Özcan is a fellow of the International Photonics Society and the Optical Society of America. For his outstanding contributions to computational imaging, sensing, and diagnostics, he has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, International Commission for Optics Award, Photonics Society Early Career Achievement Award, Biophotonics Technology Innovator Award, Army Young Investigator Award, NSF CAREER Award, NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, Navy Young Investigator Award, IEEE Photonics Society Young Investigator Award, Distinguished Lecturer Award, National Geographic Emerging Explorer Award, National Academy of Engineering Grainger Foundation Frontiers of Engineering Award, and MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 Award.
Title: Modelocking vs. Laser-Induced Patterns: A Tale of Two Self-Organized Phenomena
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Ömer İlday
Date: 07.10.2024
Speaker Bio: The physicist F. Ömer İlday completed his doctorate at Cornell University, Ithaca, United States, in 2003. He immediately became a postdoc and, from 2005, a research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States. In 2006, he was appointed to a professorship in physics at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. Since 2014, he has been a professor for Physics and Electrical and Electronics Engineering and heads the Ultrafast Optics & Lasers Laboratory UFOLAB. İlday has received numerous awards, including the Turkish Academy of Sciences’ Outstanding Young Scientist Award and a European Commission Marie Curie International Reintegration Grant in 2006. He is the holder of Turkey’s first ever ERC Consolidator Grant (2014) as well as an ERC Advanced Grant, awarded in 2022. He is an elected member of the Academia Europaea and the Bilim Akademisi – Science Academy Türkiye as well as other specialist academies such as the Turkish and the American Physical Societies.
2023-2024 Academic Year
Title: The Diverse Applications of Optics from Biology to Topology
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Aşkın Kocabaş
Date: 05.10.2023
Speaker Bio: Dr. Aşkın Kocabaş graduated from the Department of Physics at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. He received his Ph.D. at Bilkent University in Ankara, where he worked on optics and photonics. During his doctoral studies, he developed optical cavities to localize surface plasmons and focused on Moiré surfaces to slow down and localize propagating plasmons.
After completing his Ph.D., he shifted his interest to biology. He joined Sharad Ramanathan’s group at Harvard University, working on the optogenetic control of animal behavior. He developed fast optical systems to track and stimulate moving animals.
Following his postdoctoral research, he returned to Turkey and began working at Koç University in Istanbul. His current research focuses on the interactions of biological systems, employing active matter physics to understand their complexities.
2022-2023 Academic Year
Title: Did the electron pass away? Did the photon take revenge?
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Atilla Aydınlı
Date: 20.10.2022
Speaker Bio: Dr. Aydınlı, finished his Ph.D. at the University of Virginia in 1980. After a postdoctoral stint at Kansas State University he was appointed at the Engineering Physics Department of Hacettepe University in Ankara. He was awarded a scholarship to do research at Padova University where he used accelerators to study strain in epitaxial layers of InGaAs on GaAs. In 1991 he joined Bilkent University Physics Department, where set up a semiconductor device lab (w/R. Ellialtıoğlu) and did research on semiconductor lasers, light emitting diodes and infrared detectors. During this time, he was also a Fulbright Professor at Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at UC Santa Barbara.
He Joined Uludağ University Electrical and Electronics Department in 2016 and retired due to age limit in 2019. He is currently consulting and supporting projects in fiber lasers and photonics. He is currently consulting and supporting projects in fiber lasers and photonics. His current interests include, nanocrystals, semiconductor materials and semiconductor lasers, waveguide optics, plasmonic
cavities, high power and ultrafast fiber lasers.
