Temel Kotil

Who is Temel Kotil?

Temel Kotil is an aeronautical engineer and serves as the president and CEO of the Turkish Airlines since April 2005.

He graduated in Aeronautical Engineering from Istanbul Technical University with a B.Sc. degree in 1983. Awarded a scholarship by the Turkish Ministry of Industry in 1984, he was educated at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, U.S. obtaining a M.Sc. degree in Aerospace Engineering in 1986 and another M.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1987 from the same university. Temel Kotil continued his studies there and received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering in 1991. His technical fields are aircraft design and smart structures, shape memory alloys, MEMS, structural dynamics, implicit and explicit finite element methods, fatigue behavior of materials, computer aided design and design methodology, experimental mechanics and material testing, composite materials andprocess control.

After returning home in 1991, he was appointed an associate chair in the Department of Aeronautical Engineering at Istanbul Technical University. He founded and managed the laboratories of aircraft design, structural mechanics and advance computational mechanics. At the same time, Kotil was charged with duties of the manager of the department's computer center. From 1994 until 1997, he served as the manager of a technical department at Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality. Between 2002 and 2003, Kotil worked as the head of the Research, Planning and Coordination Department at Advance Innovative Technologies Inc. in New York, USA.