AHMET FAHRİ YİĞİTBAŞI
President
4th SY Award
After studying Mechanical Engineering at Aachen Technical University in Germany and completing his master’s degree in Fuel Engineering department, he started his career at Union Kraftstoff in 1987. He acted as the Deputy CEO, and then as the CEO of Botaş Packaging Industries Inc. between 1990 and 1996. He was the Vice President and President at Yaşar Holding Paints and Chemical Industries Group between 1996-2015.
He has been serving as the President of Yaşar University Board of Trustees since 2010 and Executive Board Member of Dyo Paints Incorporation and as the Vice-President of the Executive Board Member of Desa Energy Inc. since 2015. He worked as a founding Board Member at the Turkish Association of Paint Industry, and as the Chairman of the Board of Directors between 2007-2009 and 2017-2019.
Ahmet Fahri Yiğitbaşı is also a member of Turkish Industry and Business Association (TÜSİAD) and Aegean Industry and Business Association (ESİAD).
PROF. ARİF HEPBAŞLI
Member
He was born in İzmir in 1958. He has been dealing with energy-related issues for 40 years, including experience in industrial companies for 10 years and as an academic member in different universities either in Turkey or abroad (also as a research assistant for 5 years prior to industry-experience). He is the author/co-author of more than 665 scientific publications (more than 320 of which are published in journals scanned in SCI). His academic footprint (h-index) is 66 and citation number is 12,709 in the category of Web of Science (WOS) and his h-index is 86 (23,253 citation) in Google Academic and it is 69 (15,724 citation) in Scopus as of 20 November 2022. Being a member of International Advisory Board of prestigious scientific journals, he is also reviewer of many national and international journals and projects related to energy. In addition to being a member of the Energy Working Group of Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA) since 2017, he was elected as a full member of TÜBA in 2019.
Prof. Begüm Özkaynak
Member
She received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Boğaziçi University, Department of Economics. After that, she completed her second master’s degree in Economics at the University of Manchester and her doctorate in Ecological Economics and Environmental Management at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona. She is currently teaching in the Department of Economics at Boğaziçi University. Her areas of research include environmental and ecological economics, sustainable development, conflicts of interest regarding ecological sharing and governance. Her works have been published in the journals such as Ecological Economics, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Futures, Energy Policy, Progress in Planning, Environment and Planning, Environmental Values and Toplum ve Bilim. She also chaired the Local Organizing Committee for the ESSE Conference held in Istanbul in 2011. She is the co-editor-in-chief of the Ekolojik Ekonomi journal since January 2022. Recently, she has been working on environmental justice and energy policies and governance in Turkey.
Prof. Emeritus Niyazi Serdar Sarıçiftçi
Member
He was born in 1961. After graduating from the Department of Physics at the University of Vienna, he received his doctorate degree from the same faculty in 1989 and worked at the University of Stuttgart until the end of 1991. He studied at the University of California, Santa Barbara between 1992-1996 at the invitation of Prof. Alan Heeger, the Nobel Prize winner for Chemistry in 2000. In these studies, he discovered the photo-physical basis for generating electricity from the sun with semiconductor polymers and his joint study with Prof. Heeger has been the world’s first patent and publication on plastic organic solar cells (1992). He was entitled as Professor Emeritus by the Austrian Government in 1996 and was appointed as the Director of the Physical Chemistry Institute, at the Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria. He is still working in this institution. Sarıçiftçi, who has more than 600 international scientific publications and 8 patents, has 7 scientific books published as well. Being a member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences and the Austrian Academy of Sciences, he is also the owner of the 2020 Selçuk Yaşar Award.
PROF. YURDANUR ÜNAL
Member
She received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Istanbul Technical University (ITU) Meteorological Engineering Department. After that, she completed her second master’s and later her doctorate at the University of California. She is currently teaching in the Department of Meteorological Engineering at ITU.
Her areas of research include technical sciences, atmospheric sciences, meteorological engineering, atmosphere-ocean interaction, climate, climate change, climate modelling and meteorological disasters.
She worked as a coordinator and participant in 15 projects about her research areas. She was the associate editor of the prestigious academic journal, Monthly Weather Review between 2014-2015.