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Prof. Dr. Mustafa Verşan Kök
Biography
Prof. Dr. 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 in 1983 and earned his Ph.D. from the same department in 1990.
Between 1986 and 1987, he worked at Shell Company as a Wellsite Operations Engineer. Following the completion of his doctorate, he conducted postdoctoral research at CNRS–INSA Lyon and ELF Petroleum Company in France. He also served as a visiting researcher at the University of Salford, Karlsruhe University, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, and CNRS-ICARE in Orléans, France.
Between 2001 and 2006, Prof. Kök served as Advisor to the President of The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TÜBİTAK). During this period, he also acted as Türkiye’s National Contact Point for Energy, Transport, and Environment under the European Union’s 6th Framework Programme (FP6), served as a Programme Committee Member in Brussels, and chaired the Executive Committee of the Engineering Research Group (MAG).
His academic contributions include more than 210 SCI-indexed journal articles, 88 international conference papers, and 5 book chapters published in leading scientific handbooks. He coordinated four European Union FP6 projects in the fields of energy and environment, in addition to numerous national and international research projects. His work has received more than 6,450 WoS citations (Scopus: 7450; Google: 9370) with an WoS h-index of 50 (Scopus: 54; Google: 60) and he has supervised more than 40 master’s and doctoral theses.
Prof. Kök has consistently ranked among the top 2% of the world’s most influential scientists according to the Stanford University ranking (2021–2026), and among the top 0.05% of scholars worldwide in the “Highly Ranked Scholars” list published by ScholarGPS (2022–2026).
He has received numerous national and international awards, including the TÜBİTAK Incentive Award (1999), the National Mining Foundation Science Award (2007), the 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 in 2019 and Azerbaijan State Oil and Industry University in 2022, and received the Jubilee Medal of the Republic of Azerbaijan in 2023.
Prof. Kök was elected Dean of the Faculty of Engineering at Middle East Technical University in 2015 and served as Rector of the university between July 2016 and August 2024. In December 2024, he was appointed Rector of Turkish-Japanese Science and Technology University.
Prof. Kök is a Principal Member of Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA). In April 2025, he was also elected as a member of the Presidential Science, Technology and Innovation Policies Council of Türkiye.
