On July 1, 2023, professor F Ömer Ilday will come to Bochum. He has played a seminal role in developing ultrafast laser technology, transforming the field of non-linear laser-matter interactions in the last few years. He is now invited to join Ruhr University to explore new research fields in materials science and establish a world-class research center.

Ilday is a leading laser development expert. Amongst others, his research has led to breakthroughs in the development of ultrafast lasers which are, for example, used in precision machining and laser operations. In the last five years, he has very successfully re-aligned his research field towards materials science to better understand the fundamentals of laser-matter interaction. Numerous new applications for lasers, especially for beam sources with ultrashort pulse durations, are emerging from the findings. Those lasers can also be used as a tool for nanostructuring, for measuring and characterizing extremely fast processes, or in fast data transmission. In addition to materials processing, Ilday wants to devote more of his energies in Bochum to developing laser sources and the self-organization of lasers.

Ilday uses a highly interdisciplinary approach and combines theory with practical applications. He is the founding director of the Ultrafast Optics & Lasers Laboratory (Ufolab) at Bilkent University in Ankara that develops and produces technologies for research institutes around the world; he also established the first Turkish laser company. As a Humboldt Professor at Ruhr University, Ilday is to establish a new center for complex laser-matter interactions and act as a link for inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations. In the long term, this is to become an internationally renowned center from which start-ups will also emerge. His stream of work is supposed to build bridges between photonics, plasma research, materials research and manufacturing technology.

Ilday completed his doctorate at Cornell University, Ithaca, in 2003. He became a postdoc and, from 2005, a research scientist at the MIT. In 2006, he was appointed to a professorship in physics at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. Among other honors, he is the holder of Turkey’s first ever ERC Consolidator Grant (2014) as well as an ERC Advanced Grant, awarded in 2022.