I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Middle East Technical University (METU), where I lead the Signal Processing And Computational sEnsing (SPACE) Lab. Before joining METU in 2015, I was a postdoctoral research associate at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, USA. I received my Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2014, and my B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Bilkent University in 2007 and 2009, respectively.
My research lies at the intersection of computational imaging, inverse problems, machine learning, statistical signal processing, compressed sensing, and optical information processing. In particular, I focus on the joint design of physical imaging systems and algorithms for multidimensional sensing, as well as the development of physics-informed, data-driven methods for solving inverse problems. Our work contributes to advancing next-generation sensing and imaging technologies for applications in both the physical and life sciences.
During my postdoctoral research at NASA, I collaborated with Dr. Joseph M. Davila in the Heliophysics Science Division to develop novel computational spectral imaging techniques that enable high-resolution solar observations. My doctoral research at UIUC, supervised by Prof. Richard E. Blahut and Prof. Farzad Kamalabadi, focused on inverse problems and computational imaging methods for real-time, high-resolution spectral imaging.
I am the recipient of the 2025 BAGEP Young Scientist Award given by the Science Academy, Turkey. At UIUC, I was awarded the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship and the Professor Kung Chie Yeh Endowed Fellowship, and was also included in the “List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students“. Earlier, during my M.S. studies at Bilkent, I received the Departmental Research Fellowship.
I currently serve as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging, and have previously served as a Guest Editor for Optics Express and Applied Optics. I have contributed as a reviewer for numerous journals and participated in organizing committees for international conferences. Between 2021 and 2023, I served as a subcommittee member for IEEE Women in Signal Processing and as Treasurer of the IEEE SPS Turkey Chapter. Since joining METU, I have developed and taught new undergraduate and graduate courses aligned with my research interests.
For more details, please refer to my CV (available in English and Turkish).