Ekmel Ozbay

Ekmel Ozbay is a professor of Physics and Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Bilkent University and the director of the Nanotechnology Research Center in Ankara. His research areas include metamaterials, photonic crystals,MOCVD growth, fabrication and characterization of nanoelectronic and nanophotonic GaN/AlGaN devices, and high performance near-infrared semiconductor photodetectors and lasers.

Biography

Ekmel Ozbay was born on March 25, 1966 in Ankara, Turkey. He received his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey in 1987. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1989 and 1992.

From 1992-1993, Ozbay worked as a postdoctoral research associate at Stanford University. His research in Stanford focused on high speed resonant tunneling and optoelectronic devices.

Between 1993 and 1995, he worked as a scientist in the Department of Energy's Ames National Laboratory at Iowa State University in the area of photonic band gap materials.

He joined Bilkent University (Ankara, Turkey) in 1995, where he is currently a full professor in the physics and electrical electronics engineering departments. His research at Bilkent involves metamaterials, photonic crystals, GaN/AlGaN MOCVD growth, fabrication and characterization of GaN based devices, nanophotonics, nanoelectronics, plasmonics, and high speed optoelectronics.

Since 2002, he is a topical editor of the journal Optics Letters. He has published 162 journal articles and 135 international conference proceedings. His publications have received more than 2800 citations according to the Web of Science. Ozbay holds 2 patents in the area of photonic crystals. His recent review article on plasmonics appeared as an invited review article in Jan. 13th 2006 issue of "Science". Currently, he is principal investigator and executive committee member of 3 EU-FP projects: STREP project EU-DALHM (Development and Analysis of Left Handed Materials), NoE-PHOREMOST (Nanophotonics to realize Molecular-Scale Technologies), and NoE-METAMORPHOSE (MetaMaterials ORganized for radio, millimeter wave, and PHOtonic Superlattice Engineering). He is currently acting as the national delegate for Turkey in the program committee of EU-NMP (nanotechnologies, manufacturing and processes) which is in the process of preparing the workprogramme for EU-FP7. Besides the EU projects, he is principal investigator on 8 national projects supported by various funding agencies. He has worked with various high-tech companies in USA, Europe and Turkey.

Awards

Ozbay was the 1997 recipient of the Adolph Lomb Medal of the Optical Society of America and in 2005 of the European Union Descartes Science award. He is also the recipient of the 1995 Parlar Foundation young scientist, 1996 Tugac foundation technology development, 1997 TUBITAK young scientist, and 1998 Sedat Simavi Foundation Science awards.

References

* [http://www.fen.bilkent.edu.tr/~ozbay Personal Website]