Biography
Gelenbe was born in Istanbul in 1945, to Italian-born Maria Sacchet and Turkish-born Yusuf Ali Gelenbe, a descendant of the 18th century Ottoman mathematician Gelenbevi Ismail Efendi. As his father's job was in Ankara, Gelenbe moved there for his studies. He graduated from Ankara Koleji in 1962 and from the Middle East Technical University in 1966, winning the K.K. Clarke Research Award for work on "partial flux switching magnetic memory systems". Awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, he continued his studies at Polytechnic University, where he completed a Master's degree and a PhD thesis on "Stochastic automata with structural restrictions", under the supervision of Edward J. Smith.
After graduation he joined the University of Michigan as an Assistant Professor. In 1972, on leave from Michigan, he founded the Modeling and Performance Evaluation of Computer Systems research group at INRIA (France), and was a visiting lecturer at the University of Paris 13 University. In 1971 he was elected to the second Chair in Computer Science at the University of Liège, which he joined in 1973 while remaining a research director at INRIA. In 1973, he was awarded a Doctorat d'État ès Sciences Mathématiques from the Paris VI University with a thesis on "Modèlisation des systèmes informatiques", under Jacques-Louis Lions. In 1979, Gelenbe moved to the Paris-Sud 11 University in 1979 where he co-founded the Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique and its PhD Program, before joining Paris Descartes University in 1986.
Gelenbe moved back to the United States in 1991. Until 1993, he worked as a New Jersey State Endowed Professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and between 1993 and 1998 as Chaired professor and Head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. In 1998, he moved to the University of Central Florida, where he founded the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
In 2003, Gelenbe joined Imperial College London, where he was appointed Dennis Gabor Professor of Electrical Engineering following Igor Aleksander's retirement.
Read more about this topic: Erol Gelenbe
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