Award
Professor F. Ömer Ilday
Professor F. Ömer Ilday, a laser development expert, is to open up new fields of research in materials science and establish a research centre.
F. Ömer Ilday is a leading laser development expert. Amongst others, his research has led to breakthroughs in the development of ultrafast lasers which are, for example, used in precision machining and laser operations. In the last five years, F. Ömer Ilday has very successfully re-aligned his research field towards materials science to better understand the fundamentals of laser-matter interaction. Numerous new applications for lasers, especially for beam sources with ultrashort pulse durations, are emerging from the findings.
Since 2014, he has been a professor for Physics, Electrical Engineering and Electronics at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, and heads the Ultrafast Optics & Lasers Laboratory UFOLAB. F. Ömer Ilday has received numerous awards, including Turkey’s first ever ERC Consolidator Grant (2014) as well as an ERC Advanced Grant, awarded in 2022. He is an elected member of the Academia Europaea and the Turkish Academy of Sciences as well as other specialist academies such as the Turkish and the American Physical Societies.
