FENS Newsletter - Issue 3

Greetings,

It is our great pleasure to present the new issue of our newsletter that informs about many activities, achievements and events that have taken place at our faculty since the previous issue.

Perhaps the most important development is that the campus fully opened as of the Fall 2021-2022 term and the students are now back in campus. There was, however, a tremendous effort in planning to open the campus to all our students without taking any risk as far as the COVID-19 pandemic is concerned. For this, we decided to implement a hybrid education model, whereby the students can attend the lectures physically as well as online and the lecture recordings are shared with the students. The hybrid model necessitates online streaming, for which the university expended immense effort for excellent teaching experience in addition to significant investment in the technology infrastructure. There were some (technical) glitches at the start, which is normal and expected; and now the term is drawing to an end and we can safely say that we demonstrated excellence in teaching again, independent of circumstances or teaching mode; pandemic or not, online or hybrid. We would like to extend our heartfelt gratitude to all members of our university who contributed to this success with their hard work, sacrifice, resilience, and finally patience.  

The hybrid education brings about new challenges such as concerns pertaining to student participation, interaction and engagement. Those challenges are not easy to overcome and we have had endless discussions in every platform to address them. They are also part of changes happening on a grander scale that are transforming also the higher education.  In one hand, it is exciting and informative to experience this big transformation that can be an opportunity to change for the better; but our success depends on how we respond to the challenges, on the other. It seems that we will continue talking about it for quite a while.    

In this issue, we are glad to share with you that FENS members were awarded with research grants by prestigious national and international funding organizations including TÜBİTAK and EC. Here, we list the names of our faculty members and their projects. We congratulate them and wish further success in their future project proposals. We would also like remind you that there are many calls within the framework of Horizon Europe that may interest you. Keep in touch with us and SU-ATT to learn more about them and/or further orientation.

We would like to celebrate the achievements of our faculty members such as receiving prestigious awards, becoming editors to prestigious journals, giving keynote speeches, organizing scientific events, writing cover page articles, etc. We also give a list of them in this issue and extend our sincere congratulations to all those faculty members. You will find also a section for research highlights.    

In 2021, we organized many events and seminars to improve the faculty climate, to foster scientific research and improve outreach venues: our technology webinar series  "Teknolojinin Gücüyle Geleceğe", "Sharing Experiences", "FENS Lounge Meetings", "CS+X Seminars", and the like. Recently, we may have slowed down due the pandemic and hybrid education that kept us busy; but we will be back with more such events.  

Also, we are now in the final stage of MÜDEK accreditation of our five FENS undergraduate programs: Computer Science and Engineering (CS), Electronics Engineering (EE), Industrial Engineering (IE) and Mechatronics Engineering (ME) undergraduate programs for an extension of another five years; and Materials Science and Nanoengineering (MAT) for the first time. We undertook a colossal effort to prepare the reports submitted last July, and provided proofs and other documentation online recently. We are now ready for the virtual visits that will be held on January 16 and 17, 2022. Providing documents online and virtual visits add to an already challenging process and we would like to express our heartful gratitude to the vice dean for education, MÜDEK coordinators and program coordinators for their excellent teamwork. 

Last but not least, we would also like to thank our vice dean for research and her team members, and outreach committee for preparing this newsletter as it takes an immense effort to compile all this information. 

Note that the events, activities and news in this issue pertain to the time interval between February 1-November 1, 2021.If we miss any project, activity, achievements of yours in this issue, please let us know so that we include them in the next issue.