Prof. Erdal Arıkan Receives Kadir Has Achievement Award
Prof. Erdal Arıkan, Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, is the recipient of the 7th Kadir Has Award for Distinguished Achievement. The award is given each year to an individual or institution to recognize contributions to science or welfare of society on an international scale. Prof. Arıkan's award citation mentions his breakthrough result in information theory that brought a solution to a fundamental problem that stood open since the field was established by the American mathematician and engineer Claude E. Shannon in 1948. The problem concerns constructing coding schemes for sending information at rates approaching the capacity of communication channels. Recently, Prof. Arıkan was the recipient of the 2010 Sedat Simavi Science Award and the 2010 IEEE Information Theory Paper Award for the same work. Prof. Arıkan joined the faculty of Bilkent University in 1987 after a brief period as assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He received his B.S. degree from the California Institute of Technology in 1981, his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1982 and 1986, respectively, all in electrical engineering.