Bilal Tanatar - Biography#

B. Tanatar obtained his B.S. degree in Physics in 1982 from the Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey. He then went to the University of Delaware in the U.S. for graduate studies. Working under the supervision of Henry Glyde on microscopic theories of liquid helium-3, he obtained his Ph.D. in 1987. He moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to work with David Ceperley as a post-doctoral associate on the quantum Monte Carlo simulations of many-body systems, in particular the two-dimensional electron gas. In 1989 he joined the group of Mahi Singh at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario as a post-doctoral research associate to work on many-body aspects of low-dimensional semiconductor structures.

After a brief stint of military service in Turkey, B. Tanatar took up a post-doctoral research position at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy in 1990. Here he continued to work on quantum Monte Carlo simulations and many-body problems in low-dimensional systems. He has been an Associate Member of the Centre (1994-2002) first and a Senior Associate Member (2002-2008) afterward. In 1991 he joined as faculty the Department of Physics of Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey which was then forming as a new institution. At Bilkent, he enjoyed working with a select group of students who later became leaders themselves in various universities in Turkey. From 2001 to 2006 he served as the department chairman, and nowadays sits in the governing board of the Faculty of Science.