Gokhan Serhat and Yitian Shao become faculty members at prestigious European universities

Gokhan Serhat moved to KU Leuven as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering in October 2022. Prior to this faculty position, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, which he joined in March 2019. He earned his Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering (2018) from Koc University, where he worked as a Marie Curie early-stage research fellow. He also holds an M.Sc. degree in Computational Mechanics (Technical University of Munich, 2013) and a B.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering (Middle East Technical University, 2011). Dr. Gokhan Serhat has authored more than 20 peer-reviewed scientific publications. He was awarded a Marie-Curie Fellowship and a full Ph.D. scholarship at Koc University, and he ranked first among the doctorate awardees at the Graduate School of Sciences and Engineering. His research interests include computational mechanics, numerical methods, and design optimization.

Yitian Shao started as a Junior Professor at the Technische Universität Dresden (TU Dresden) in July 2022. He is associated with the Cluster of Excellence, Center for Tactile Internet with Human-in-the-Loop (CeTI). His research focuses on wearable technologies, haptic interfaces, augmented/virtual reality, and artificial tactile sensing. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems from 2021 to 2022. He received his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 2020. Furthermore, he earned an M.S. degree from UCSB in 2019, and he received a B.E. degree in electrical engineering and automation from Tianjin University, China, in 2013. In 2019, he worked as a research intern at Microsoft Applied Sciences Group. He was awarded a Humboldt Research Fellowship for postdoctoral researchers and the EuroHaptics Society Best Ph.D. Thesis Award in 2021.