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Prof. Dr. Mustafa Verşan Kök – Biography
Prof. Mustafa Verşan Kök completed his primary education at the International School of Prague (Czech Republic) and graduated from Ankara Atatürk High School in Türkiye. He received his B.Sc. degree in Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering from Middle East Technical University (METU) in 1983 and his Ph.D. from the same department in 1990. Between 1986–1987, he worked at SHELL Petroleum as a Well-Site Operation Engineer. Following his doctorate, he carried out postdoctoral research at CNRS-INSA de Lyon and ELF Petroleum Company in France. He also held visiting researcher positions at the University of Salford (UK), Karlsruhe University (Germany), Budapest University of Technology and Economics (Hungary), and CNRS-ICARE in Orléans, France. Between 2001–2006, Prof. Kök served as Advisor to the President of TÜBİTAK, where he also acted as Türkiye’s National Contact Point for Energy, Transport and Environment within the EU’s 6th Framework Programme, Programme Committee Member in Brussels, and Chairman of the Engineering Research Group Executive Committee.
His academic contributions include more than 210 SCI-indexed articles, 86 international conference papers, and book chapters in leading handbooks. He coordinated four EU FP6 projects in the fields of energy and environment, in addition to several international and national projects. His work has received more than 8,900 citations, with an h-index of 58, and he has supervised more than 40 master’s and doctoral theses. He has consistently ranked among the top 2% of the most influential scientists worldwide (Stanford University, 2021–2024) and among the top 0.05% of scholars globally in the “Highly Ranked Scholars” list by ScholarGPS (2022–2024).
Prof. Kök has received numerous national and international awards, including the TÜBİTAK Incentive Award (1999), National Mining Foundation Science Award (2007), Prof. Dr. Mustafa Parlar Foundation Science Award (2008), and the OIC International Leader Scientist and Engineer Award (2008). He was awarded honorary doctorates by Kazan Federal University (2019) and Azerbaijan State Oil and Industry University (2022), and received the Jubilee Medal of the Republic of Azerbaijan (2023).
He was elected Dean of the Faculty of Engineering at Middle East Technical University (METU) in 2015 and served as Rector of METU between July 2016 and August 2024. In December 2024, he was appointed Rector of the Turkish-Japanese Science and Technology University (TJU). Prof. Kök is a Principal Member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA) and, in April 2025, he was appointed as a member of the Presidential Science, Technology and Innovation Policies Council of Türkiye.
