One of the world’s leading academics in the field of cryptology, Prof. Dr. Çetin Kaya Koç was born and raised in Ağrı. After completing high school, he went to Istanbul, which he described as “blowing my mind.” He graduated first in his class from ITU Electronic and Communication Engineering in 1980. He completed his doctorate at the University of California.

He established the Information Security Center at Oregon State University in the United States. As a result of his work there, he was honored with the ‘Outstanding and Sustained Research Leadership’ award.

He founded the world’s second-largest cryptography conference, the Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems Workshop (“Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems”). He was awarded the title of “IEEE Fellow” (scientists who have made very valuable contributions in their field) in 2007 for his contributions to cryptography (encryption) engineering.

He is one of the three scientists in the world who have trained the most students in cryptology and encryption.

Prof. Dr. Çetin Kaya Koç serves as a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is an associate editor of the International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science.

His areas of interest include: electronic voting, cyber-physical security, cryptographic hardware and embedded systems, elliptic curve cryptography and finite field arithmetic, and deterministic, hybrid, and true random number generators.