Ekrem TEKİN

Ekrem Tekin is the General Manager of the Technology Transfer Office at the public Gaziantep University in Turkey as well as an independent scholar in the field of industrial engineering. He is passionate about technology making a difference in people's lives. Words and presentations do positively affect and change people's lives. What better individual is there than a good leader in the setting in southeast Turkey where they are striving to establish robust linkages between emerging technologies, knowledge-based innovation and societal development.

He is a graduate of Gaziantep University. During his university education he has participated at the ERASMUS program and been to Lisbon as an international scholar. He has attended some Leadership programs in Lisbon and those all inspired and made him firmly believe that developing himself in leadership and being a game changer and transformative character for university's 40,000 students and the large innovation ecosystem of the city of Gaziantep, the 6th largest in Turkey. He had traveled to 18 countries with very limited resources when he was a student and considers himself as a global citizen and open to diversity and diverse world cultures. When he returned, he graduated and appointed at the university's Technology Transfer Office as an executive, inspiring him to realize him and his collective dreams of linkig education, technology and innovation and embedding it in society.

Gaziantep is a highly entrepreneurial city known for investments in material industry and now transforming to knowledge based high tech industry. He thinks that they sorely need to educate the citizens and students and local and national policymakers alike. Ekrem’s team's prior goal is to create and sustain awareness in the university and its students among the local people. His second goal is to open new horizons and vistas in people’s minds and hearts.

Topics that he is mostly interested in;

- Citizen science and innovation by local communities

- Disruptive innovation and Middle East

- Technology policy innovation

- Rethinking expertise for innovation

- University as a transformative venue for student driven innovation