My Biography

I was born in Frankfurt, Germany and was very interested in technology and reading books from a young age. My dad was particularly interested in video cameras and bought the first consumer Sony Betamax camera. I had the honour of using it from a very young age, at special occasions. On the other hand, computers would be a hobby I would spend most of my time with. My first computer was a Commodore 64 and programming quickly became an addiction. At the age of 13, I was programming in Basic and Assembly 6502.

My family decided to return back to Istanbul, Turkiye. I still continued programming but realized that life as a programmer is not very ‘social’ and that that a career as a telcommunication engineer will provide more opportunity to design systems and communicate with the customers. I studied at Uskudar Anadolu College (which has been renamed) for 4 years. My majors were mathematics and physics in preparation for my engineering degree. I took the university entrance exams and managed to get into the new Electronic Engineering program of Istanbul University. Had several internships in Turkey and was studying English in my spare time as I wanted to do my Masters in England or the US. I graduated after some hard study and won the Turkish Education Foundation (TEV) – British Council joint scholarship for my MSc study in the UK. After another year of hard study I received an MSc with Distinction in Satellite and Telecommunication Engineering from the University of Surrey. Although I wanted to do my PhD in the US, the CCSR convinced me to stay by offering the Centre for Satellite Engineering Research scholarship which provide funding for PhD research for EC nationals. I also won an Overseas Research Scholarship to cover the university overseas tuition fees, which meant that I had full funding for my PhD as well as living expenses.

I was employed by the CCSR as a Research Fellow, which meant a slightly better salary than the student grant. I completed my PhD in the Centre for Communication Systems Research (CCSR), University of Surrey investigating Traffic and congestion control functions for satellite ATM networks with emphasis on guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS). As a result of my research I have more than twenty publications at international conferences including papers published in books.

After a while as post-doc in the university, the recommendation by most friends was that I should move to industry to get some hands-on experience. So, I joined Nortel Networks Broadband Satellite Network Division as Senior Research/Systems Engineer. My main responsibility was to write system requirements for the Astra broadband satellite network and to lead the definition of the systems IP architecture. At the peak of the Telecoms boom Nortel decided to decrease their activity in the satellite area to concentrate more on their terrestrial core business before going bankrupt.

After two interviews in the US I joined Intelsat as Senior Network Engineer to work on the Broadband Satellite programme. When Intelsat changed from an Inter-Governmental-Organization to a commercial I was promoted to Principal Systems/Network Engineer and joined the Telecommunications Service Development group. I then applied and was offered the position as Network Management Systems (NMS) Manager in the Network Engineering and Implementation group.

I have completed an MSc in Project Management and a post-graduate Documentary Filmmaking degree at GWU in Washington DC. I have the PMI Project Management Professional (PMP) as well as the Prince2 and Programme Management (MSP) and MoR (Manager or Risk) practitioner. Also got certified for Service Management with the ITILv3 foundation certification. Took two classes on Poverty Reduction from SOAS.

I co-authored various project proposals and is also participating in several professional consortium. I also participated in standardization bodies (such as ITU-T, IETF, ATIS and ETSI).

After 5 years working on terrestrial infrastructure programmes in London, I joined Inmarsat (now Viasat) as a consultant in 2012. Fast forward 9 years working on several space and AI jobs before joining CGI as Director of Consulting in 2021, leading the OneWeb (now Eutelsat OneWeb) team.

I completed the International Space University Space Studies Program in 2023 and then changed my consulting business focus to New Space start-ups. I volunteer at Team Tumbleweed as Head of R&D.

In order to contribute to my ultimate objective of super-intelligence I did a MSc in Computational Cognitive Neuroscience. The idea is to take the human brain as inspiration to create a synthetic intelligece far superior to limited human intelligence.