Burak Aydın was born in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2000. He received his BS degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering with High Honors from Bogazici University, Istanbul, in 2023. He also completed the economics minor program. He completed his senior design project at the Photonics and Optical Wireless Communication Laboratory (POWCOL) under the supervision of Dr. Heba Yuksel. During his undergraduate studies, he spent one summer as an Undergraduate Research Intern at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Stuttgart, Germany, at the Robotics, Collectives and Learning Subgroup. He is currently a first-year PhD student at the Operations Research and Financial Engineering department at Princeton University, New Jersey, USA.
Heba Yuksel received a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland at College Park (UMCP) in 1996, an M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1998, and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from UMCP in 2005. In 2005, she was a postdoctorate research associate at UMCP. In 1998, she worked as a system engineer at Conexant Systems, Newport Beach, California. Between 1999 and 2002, she worked as a hardware design engineer at Ciena Corporation in Linthicum, Maryland. She is currently an Associate Professor of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey. She is head of the “Photonics and Optical Wireless Communication Laboratory” (POWCOL) at Bogazici University. Her research interests include atmospheric turbulence, transmitter/receiver design, aperture averaging, and image sensing for free-space optical communication (optical wireless) links, visible light communication (VLC), vehicle-to-vehicle VLC communication, security in optical fiber communication, 3D surface topography using optical systems, and optical temperature sensors. Dr. Yuksel has published numerous journal and conference papers. She is a member of professional engineering societies like IEEE, OSA, SPIE, and SWE. From 2012 to 2019, she was in the organizing committee for the SPIE Optics & Photonics conference, held annually in San Diego, California.
