Defne Aktas (Kucukyavuz)

Biography

Defne Aktas received her B.S. degree from Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Turkey, in 1996, her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from The Ohio State University, Columbus, USA, in 1998 and 2002, respectively, all in electrical engineering. In September 2004, she joined Bilkent University, where she is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering.

Before joining Bilkent University, she was a Research Fellow at ARC Special Research Centre for Ultra-Broadband Information Networks (CUBIN) in The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia, and a Postdoctoral Researcher at Information Processing Systems Laboratory (IPS) of The Ohio State University, Columbus, USA.

Her research interests are in the broad area of communication theory, in particular in physical layer aspects of wireless communication systems, with emphasis on coding and information theoretic analysis of multiple input multiple output (MIMO) wireless communication systems.

Dr. Aktas is a recipient of the European Union Marie Curie Fellowship (2006-2009) and TUBITAK Career Grant (2008-2010). She has been a reviewer for many scientific journals including IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications and IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications and has been a member of Technical Program Committee of several professional conferences. She is a member of IEEE and a TED Ankara Koleji alumna, class of 1992.

She is married to Emre. Defne and Emre are the parents of Melis Ece.