Ertugrul Basar

Prof. Ertugrul Basar was born in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1985. He received the B.S. degree (with High Honors) from Istanbul University, Turkey, in 2007 and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Istanbul Technical University, Turkey, in 2009 and 2013, respectively. He is an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey, and the director of the Communications Research and Innovation Laboratory (CoreLab). Before joining Koç University, he held positions as an Assistant Professor and an Associate Professor at Istanbul Technical University from 2014 to 2017 and from 2017 to 2018, respectively. In the past, he had visiting positions at Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA, as a Visiting Research Collaborator (2011-2022) and at Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany, as a Mercator Fellow (2022).

Prof. Basar’s primary research interests include beyond 5G and 6G wireless systems, MIMO systems, index modulation, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, waveform design, zero-power and thermal noise communications, software-defined radio, physical layer security, quantum key distribution systems, and signal processing/deep learning for communications. He is an inventor of ten pending/granted patents on future wireless technologies.

Prof. Basar has received numerous awards and recognitions for his research, including the “National Leader Researchers” support from The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) in 2022, “IEEE ComSoc Best Young Researcher Award for the Europe, Middle East, and Africa Region” in 2020, “Science Heroes Association Scientist of the Year Award” in 2019, “ODTU Parlar Foundation Research Encouragement Award” in 2018, “The Science Academy (Turkey) Young Scientists (BAGEP) Award” in 2018, “Turkish Academy of Sciences Outstanding Young Scientist (TÜBA-GEBİP) Award” in 2017, and the first-ever “IEEE Turkey Research Encouragement Award” in 2017. He also received ten Best Paper Awards, including those from the IEEE International Conference on Communications 2016 and the 2023 IEEE 97th Vehicular Technology Conference. Moreover, he was a TPC track chair or a TPC member for several IEEE conferences, such as GLOBECOM, ICC, PIMRC, and VTC.

With around 150 international journal publications that have received around 12,500 citations, Prof. Basar’s contributions to communications and wireless technologies are highly regarded. Notably, in the recent list of the World’s Top 2% Scientists, his yearly and career-long rankings are 21st and 254th in the subfield of Networking & Telecommunications. His dedication to teaching has also been recognized, as evidenced by the 2022-2023 Koç University Outstanding Teaching Award, and he supervised 2 Ph.D. and 17 Master of Science students.

Currently serving as an Associate Editor of Frontiers in Communications and Networks, Dr. Basar has previously held editorial positions for various journals, including IEEE Communications Letters (2016-2022), IEEE Transactions on Communications (2018-2022), Physical Communication (2017-2020), and IEEE Access (2016-2018). Additionally, he is the founding Academic Chair of the IEEE ComSoc Emerging Technologies Initiative on Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces. He is an Associate Member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA) and a Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA).

In recognition of his outstanding contributions to physical-layer design for next-generation wireless networks, Prof. Basar was elevated to IEEE Fellow in 2023, becoming one of the youngest IEEE Fellows of Turkey at the age of 37.