Turkish American Scientists and Scholars Association (TASSA)
Board of Directors
(in alphabetical order)
Hüseyin Abut
Professor Emeritus, College of Engineering, SDSU and Adjunct Professor at
Boğaziçi University
Turgay Ertekin
Professor of Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering and George E. Trimble Chair
in Earth and Mineral Sciences, Department of Petroleum and Natural Gas
Engineering, Pennsylvania State University
Murat Günel
Nixdorff-German Professor, Departments of Neurosurgery, Neurobiology and
Genetics, Yale University School of Medicine
Orhan Gürbüz
Nuclear Engineering Consultant at Gurbuz Consulting and Director at Tobolski
Watkins Engineering Inc.
Şebnem Kalemli-Özcan Endowed Professor of Economics, Department of Economics, University of
Houston, Visiting Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University
Mehmet Toner
Helen Andrus Benedict Professor of Surgery and Health Sciences and Technology,
Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital
Aydoğan Özcan
Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, Department of Electrical
Engineering, UCLA
Füsun Özgüner
Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering, The Ohio State University
Haluk Ünal
Chairman of the Board- Professor of Finance, Department of Finance, Robert H.
Smith School of Business, University of Maryland
Biographical Sketches of Board of Directors
(in Alphabetical Order)
Hüseyin Abut
Dr. Abut is Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering at San Diego
State University, where he has served as a FERP professor through 2006 and a fullprofessor between 1981 through 2001. At present, he is a visiting Adjunct
Professor at Boğaziçi University and Visiting Professor and the NEDO Program
Director at Sabancı University, both in İstanbul, Turkey. He served as the director
of an academic research facility for more than twenty years and was the interim
associate dean for research. He has served twice at the capacity of Senior Advisor
for the U.N. Programme Development. He is the author, editor or co-editor of 6
books and the author/co-author of more than 100 publications in journals, books,
and book chapters in the field of speech processing, speaker verification, image
processing, image understanding, biometrics, and signal processing for vehicular
applications and driver behavior. He holds two patents on Speaker Verification
Systems for Consumer Applications. His recent interests include smart devices,
materials, and systems for ‘Patient-Centric Remote Medicine” for heart attack and
stroke prevention.
Turgay Ertekin
Dr. Ertekin is George E. Trimble Chair in Earth and Mineral Sciences and Professor
of Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University.
Dr. Ertekin has had extensive experience with the development and application of
fluid flow models in porous media. His research focuses on the mathematical
modeling of flow problems using various techniques. He has taught courses in
fluid flow dynamics in porous media at the graduate and undergraduate levels and
has directed the research work of more than 100 graduate students on reservoir
modeling and reservoir engineering. Dr.Ertekin has given more than 250 invited
lectures, paper presentations and seminars, and more than 25 workshops and
short courses throughout the world, and has authored or co-authored more than
200 publications including four books and four book chapters.
Murat Günel
Dr. Günel is the Nixdorff-German Professor of neurological surgery and currently
serves as Professor of Neurosurgery and Professor of Genetics and of
Neurobiology, Director of the Yale Program in Brain Tumor Research and CoDirector of the Yale Program on Neurogenetics. Dr. Günel earned his degree from
the İstanbul School of Medicine, followed by his residency in the Department of
Neurosurgery at the Yale School of Medicine, joining the School of Medicine
faculty in 1998. Clinically, Dr. Günel specializes in the microsurgery of complex
intracranial pathologies, including cerebral aneurysms, vascular malformations
and tumors. In addition, he is a world-renowned expert on the molecular
genetics of intracranial aneurysms, leading an international team spanning across
10 countries and 32 institutions, identifying eight genomic regions that contain
brain aneurysm susceptibility genes. Finally, through the study of a unique
collection of nearly 2,000 index cases suffering from recessive forms of brain
malformations (mainly recruited from Turkey), he continues to focus on the
discovery of novel genes fundamental in brain development.
Orhan Gürbüz
Dr. Gürbüz is Nuclear Engineering Consultant at Gürbüz Consulting and Director
at Tobolski Watkins Engineering Inc. Dr. Gürbüz received his Ph.D. from Iowa
State University in Structural Engineering in 1974. He worked over 35 years at
Bechtel Corporation in various positions, providing technical leadership in the
design of about thirty nuclear power plants. He attained the position of Senior
Technical Specialist and Bechtel Fellow. Upon retirement, he became a
consultant to the nuclear industry; supporting nuclear power plants and National
Laboratories for the Department of Energy. He has been active in professional
organizations and hold leadership positions in technical societies. Currently he is
the co-chair of a standards-developing committee for earthquake engineering
and a member of the concrete design committee, both for nuclear facilities.
Şebnem Kalemli-Özcan Dr. Kalemli-Özcan is an Endowed Professor of Economics at the University of
Houston since 2010 and a Visiting Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University.
She is also a Visiting Professor of Economics and Finance at Koç University in
Turkey since 2011. She has published extensively in the areas of international
finance, international development and applied growth theory. Her current
research focuses on the linkages between real and financial sectors in a
globalized economy and the effects of such linkages on economic fluctuations
and development. She was the Duisenberg Fellow at the European Central Bank
in Spring 2008, has been a Research Associate at the National Bureau of
Economic Research (NBER) since 2005, and has been a Research Fellow at the
Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) since 2011. She has also held a
position as lead economist/advisor for the Middle East and North Africa Region at
the World Bank during 2010-2011. Dr. Kalemli-Özcan received her BS in
Economics from Middle East Technical University in 1995 and her PhD in
Economics from Brown University in 2000.
Aydoğan Özcan:
Dr. Özcan is currently an Associate Professor leading the Bio- and Nano-Photonics
Laboratory at the Electrical Engineering and Bioengineering Departments at
UCLA. Dr. Özcan received his Ph.D. degree at Stanford University Electrical
Engineering Department in 2005. After a short post-doctoral fellowship at
Stanford University, he is appointed as a Research Faculty Member at Harvard
Medical School, Wellman Center for Photomedicine in 2006. Dr. Özcan holds 18
issued patents and another 12 pending patent applications for his inventions in
nanoscopy, wide-field imaging, lensless imaging, nonlinear optics, fiber optics,
and optical coherence tomography. In addition, Dr. Özcan is the founder and a
member of the Board of Directors of Holomic LLC.
Füsun Özgüner:
Dr. Özgüner is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Ohio
State University, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Dr. Özgüner received an M.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Istanbul
Technical University in 1972, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from
the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 1975. She worked at the I.B.M.
T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York for one year and
joined the faculty at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Istanbul Technical
University in 1976. She served as the Interim Department Chair from September
2004 to 2006. Her current research interests are parallel and fault-tolerant
architectures, heterogeneous distributed computing, reconfiguration and
communication in parallel architectures, real-time parallel computing and
communication, on-chip multiprocessing and wireless mobile networks.
Mehmet Toner
Dr. Toner is the Helen Andrus Benedict Professor of Biomedical Engineering at
the Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and Harvard-MIT
Division of Health Sciences and Technology. Dr. Toner received a BS degree from
Istanbul Technical University and MS degree from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT), both in Mechanical Engineering. Subsequently he completed
his PhD degree in Medical Engineering at Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences
and Technology in 1989. Since that time he has been on the faculty at Harvard
Medical School. Dr. Toner established the Center for Engineering in Medicine,
and BioMicroElectroMechanical Systems Resource Center (BMRC) at the MGH to
explore the applications of bioengineering in basic biology, systems biology,
diagnostics and clinical medicine.
Haluk Ünal
Dr. Ünal is a Professor of Finance, at the Robert H. Smith School of Business,
University of Maryland, Special Advisor to the Center for Financial Research of
the FDIC, and Senior Fellow at the Wharton Financial Institutions Center. He is
also the Managing Editor of the Journal of Financial Services Research. Dr. Ünal
holds doctorates in finance from The Ohio State University and in economics
from Istanbul University, where he did his undergraduate work as well. Dr. Ünal
also earned an MS degree in accounting from Ohio State. His current research
focuses on executive compensation, corporate bonds, bank mergers, pricing
default risk, risk management, and bank resolution costs. Mr. Ünal has been a
consultant to the World Bank, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the
Department of Justice. He is also on the academic council of Standard and Poor’s.
Internationally, he delivered invited lectures in Portugal, China, Italy, Mexico,
Peru, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, and Turkey. He also held executive training for
Fannie Mae, Hughes Network Systems, Oracle, SAIC, China Merchants Bank,
Banco Santander, and Wharton’s EMTM program.