I was very keen on going straight back home after my degree and took a job at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. Then I married and had to move to Istanbul and joined the Istanbul Technical University which has since then become my home. It is true these were troubled times, but also filled with hope and a strange urgency; the feeling that what you did could possibly help change the world for a better and happier place. I was involved in the socialist movement, organizing women and in the anti-nuclear peace committee. When the military took over in September, 1980, and they started persecuting people for such activities, I decided to leave the country and look for jobs in Europe. I had not been doing much research for the past four years and I had to really scramble to catch up. When I left Istanbul in February 1981, I went to Stockholm, where my brother was doing his Ph.D. in economics and I am thankful to Goran Grimvall, then head of the Theoretical Physics department at the KTH, for allowing me to spend four months there. Friends from Stony Brook also helped: Hans Hoye, who had been George Stell’s postdoc was kind enough to invite me to spend a month at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Trondheim. I spent a month at Gotheborg and another in Delft before I left for Trieste, where I spent the rest of the summer at the ICTP. Then I went to Geneva for a year, where I did some very enjoyable work with J.P. Eckmann, in collaboration with B. Derrida, on chaotic renormalization group flows in frustrated systems. Meanwhile, I had applied for a job in Porto, and my dear friend from Stony Brook, Sushil K. Mendiratta, who was (and still is) working in Aveiro, was able to convince the colleagues there that this nobody from outer-space was really ok. So I spent three wonderful and very fruitful years in Porto, did some work on spin glasses, some of it in collaboration with Eduardo Lage, learned the language enough to teach and made lifelong friends.

My first marriage had not worked out and I was alone during this time. I met another political refugee, Orhan Sillier and moved to Germany on a Humboldt fellowship working in Marburg with Siegfried Grossmann, whose mentorship I still cherish. In 1987, Orhan set up the Turkish department at the International Center for Social History in Amsterdam and I found a postdoc with Pietronero in Groningen, where we did some very interesting work on fractals, fractal growth, and anomalous relaxation. In 1990 we moved to Istanbul.

I am grateful to ITU for having welcomed me back. I am now a professor at the Department of Physics and also spend part of my time at the Feza Gursey Institute, a research institute for theoretical physics and mathematics, which I help run.

Meanwhile in 1995, I was elected to the Turkish Academy of Sciences and in 1997 I shared the science prize of TUBITAK, the national science council of Turkey, with Mehmet Erbudak (Yale 1972). Also I am an associate editor of the European Physical Journal B (condensed matter physics).

(Advisor: George Stell)

I have been on faculty in the Physiology Department at Virginia Commonwealth University since 1974. I teach medical and graduate students and conduct research in the area of oxygen transport in the microcirculation (exercise, aging, artificial oxygen, instrumentation).

Stony Brook experience was a great opportunity to learn from outstanding mentors in content and style (especially high marks to Professors Eisenbud, Grannis, Kirz and Yang). Advisor: Paul Grannis

I finished my degree in the Nuclear Structure Laboratory in 1987 with Peter Braun-Munzinger. After two postdoc years at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, I moved to GSI Darmstadt, the German National Center for heavy ion research. Subsequently I spent a few years on Aphrodites Island, also known under the name of Cypress. I’m currently back at GSI collaborating on the HADES experiment. At the heart of this experiment are medium modifications of light vector mesons. Stay tuned: soon you’ll hear more about Brown-Rho scaling from this side of the Atlantic!!! (Advisor: Peter Braun-Munzinger)

I have been working as a research physicist for UGM Medical Systems, Inc. in downtown Philadelphia for the two years since my graduation from Stony Brook. This small company develops and commercially sells positron emission tomography (PET) scanners for clinical medical use - mainly whole-body cancer surveys but also cardiac and brain studies. The detectors in our scanners are large continuous plates of NaI (T1) coupled to arrays of photomultiplier tubes for event position determination. My position entails working partly on software, partly with experimental hardware and electronics in order to continuously improve the performance of the scanner while keeping costs competitive.

The work is generally interesting and challenging and involves many concepts of radiation and detector physics I learned as a graduate student in experimental nuclear physics. (Advisor: David Fossan)

I am a Professor of Physics at Yale University. After receiving my Ph.D. at Stony Brook, I spent 17 years at LBO before coming to Yale. I have been spokesperson for the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at BNL since its inception in 1990. I am married and have a wonderful, supportive family and friends. Besides the family, windsurfing in waves is my personal passion and has been my hobby away from physics for the past 18 years. (Advisor: Bob McGrath)

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Last modified 1/28/04