FENS Newsletter - Issue 4

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

We are happy to be back with the new issue of the FENS newsletter. Time flies, especially during the pandemic; but much has happened since the previous issue when one comes to think of it: many activities, achievements, good news and also changes in pandemic conditions.

We started the 2021-2022 Spring Term in hybrid mode, which allows students to participate in the lectures in person physically or online remotely, providing them with online streaming and the video recordings afterwards for their further convenience. This is possible due to the investment in advanced technology in our classrooms and immense effort by our IT staff and faculty members, who worked with dedication and commitment.

Most important of all is that our students are now back in campus and enjoying every aspect of academic life whether they show up in lectures or not. While all these developments feel great, we face new challenges in engaging students as their attendance and class participation are lower than expected. This may not adversely affect students' overall academic success; but it can still be demotivating for the teaching faculty and definitely not good so far as active learning is concerned.

As COVID-19 shows signs of going out of pandemic phase, we are planning to returning back to normal, i.e., having lectures in person as soon as possible. We are hoping to go back to the pre-pandemic normal in the 2022-2023 Fall Term (having our fingers crossed). Now, the question is what the academic life will look like in the post-pandemic world. Will some of the online/hybrid teaching practices/innovations survive in one form or the other? Are we going to make use of our new online/hybrid teaching skills and capacity? What are we going to do with our high-tech hybrid classrooms and how are we going to utilize them? Will we continue inviting guest speakers from the other end of the word to our webinars and graduate seminars? There are many thought-provoking questions awaiting us to address them. It seems that we will be talking about those issues for a while. Naturally, we are open to your suggestions, ideas and creative solutions from you as always.

On the research project front, FENS faculty members have been very active in preparing project proposals and their endeavor and hard work are being paid off 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 activities. 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 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.

We continue to organize many events and seminars to improve the faculty climate, foster scientific research and improve outreach venues. Our signature technology webinar series "Teknolojinin Gücüyle Geleceğe" attracting more interest and becoming more interdisciplinary. Computer scientists come together with historians and visual artists talking about their joint projects. The webinar series “Applications of Engineering", organized by Sabancı and Harvard University Faculty Members featuring renowned scientist all around the world (some of them Sabanci University faculty), is amazing and definitely deserves much more participation. "Sharing Experiences" is designed for speakers to share their first-hand experiences that can be interesting and useful for everyone in academic life. And finally, we will be organizing "FENS Lounge" pretty soon with 15 minute science talks and, of course, music.

In February, we completed our end of the MÜDEK accreditation process 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. Now, we are waiting for the results, which will be due soon. We see the process conducive to the further improvement of our education system and we already started making changes.

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 November 1, 2021 and April 1, 2022. 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.