From Industry to Academia: Starting at Sabancı University

As of August 1st 2026, I’ve started as an Assistant Professor of Electronics Engineering at Sabancı University. After 16 years of building antennas, radars, and communications systems in the defense industry, I’m moving to the other side of the table — from delivering systems to researching open problems that future systems will be built on.

The road here

I’ve spent my career as a self-proclaimed generalist, at the intersection of electromagnetics and signal processing: computational electromagnetics (CEM), metasurface antennas, phased arrays, and the algorithms that make them function. I’ve pursued my academic career alongside my industrial career, with my MS and PhD work on novel CEM methods in Bilkent University, under the supervision of my long-time mentor and collaborator Vakur B. Ertürk. I started my industrial career as an Antenna Engineer at Aselsan, then moved on to Research Engineering in the Aselsan Research Center. After obtaining my PhD, I’ve worked as a visiting researcher in Bilkent University and worked with Huawei Wireless Research Centre in Ottawa on groundbreaking research on Semantic Communications and Semantic Signal Processing. After 2023, I’ve worked as the Electronics Design Manager at Meteksan Savunma, where we’ve built highly competitive radar, sonar, and military comms systems.

Industry taught me things no paper could: that requirements documents are where elegant ideas go to be humbled, that a design isn’t done until it survives manufacturing, and that the gap between “works in simulation” and just “works” is where real engineering lives. I’m proud and grateful for that experience that built this mindset.

Why academia, why now

The problems I most want to work on have moved upstream. The tools we use to design electromagnetic systems — full-wave solvers, optimization loops, design intuition itself — are about to be reshaped by machine learning, and the foundational work is happening in universities.

There’s also a quieter reason. I’ve always been passionate about bringing new engineers/students to our field. I’ve been teaching since 2024 at Bilkent University, which has been one of the most fulfilling endeavors I’ve experienced so far in my career. In my opinion, the “new blood” is the driving force behind innovation as we progress the science, and teaching in a university is the best way of being integrated into that innovative environment.

What my group will work on

Three threads, one theme: building intelligent electromagnetics environments.

AI-augmented electromagnetic solvers. Full-wave CEM is accurate but expensive. We’re exploring how neural networks can learn the expensive parts of the computation — not as black-box surrogates, but embedded inside the solver’s structure, so accuracy stays accountable, efficiency becomes the frontier.

Reconfigurable and metasurface antennas. Surfaces whose electromagnetic behavior can be programmed after manufacture — for radar, sensing, and next-generation wireless comms. This includes an emerging line I find genuinely exciting: using these surfaces to compute — analog processing in the wave domain, before anything is digitized. This has many implications going forward from efficiency to secrecy/privacy of computations.

Phased arrays and array signal processing. The workhorse technology of modern radar and wireless, and the bridge between the hardware I’ve built and the algorithms I want to build next. I’m also designing a new graduate/senior course on exactly this bridge — more on that soon.

If you’re a student

As a new Professor, I’m actively recruiting. If you’re an MSc or PhD candidate (or even an interested and strong undergrad) excited by electromagnetics, signal processing, machine learning, or the connections between them — and you like problems where the math is beautiful and the hardware is real — get in touch!

What’s next

I’ll try to write my thoughts here regularly — about research, about building a lab and a course from scratch, and occasionally about the things that keep me sane outside the office (there will be climbing). If you want to follow along, this site is the hub; everything else links back here.

See you all on campus.