Rector's CV

Prof. Dr. Muhammed Şahin

Born in the Pazar sub-province of Rize in 1965, schooled at Pazar Village Primary, Secondary School and High Schools. Professor Şahin graduated from the Geomatics Engineering, Faculty of Civil Engineering, Istanbul Technical University (ITU) in 1987, with the highest grades.
Professor Şahin received his master's degree from University College London in 1991, and his PhD degree from University of Newcastle in 1994. He became an assistant professor in 1994, an associate professor in 1998 and a tenured Professor in 2002 at ITU. He was a short-term visiting fellow at Graz Technical University in 1997 and at Berlin Technical University in 2000.
During the years 1996-2004 at ITU, he assumed several administrative positions such as Advisor to the Rector, Director of the School of Foreign Languages, Chairman of the Department of Surveying Techniques, and Coordinator for the Graduate Programs in Advanced Technologies.
Professor Şahin was appointed as the Rector of Istanbul Technical University on August 6th, 2008 and his tenure ended on August 6th, 2012. In 2009, Prof. Şahin was the first and only rector from Turkey to be elected as a member of the Board of Directors of CESAER (Conference of European Schools for Advanced Engineering Education and Research), based in Belgium and including the most prominent engineering universities in Europe. In February 2012, Professor Şahin was nominated and elected unanimously to the four-member Executive Board of CESAER on account of the contributions he had made to “Research and Strategy Management at Universities”.
Between August 2008 and August 2012, he was the Chairman of ITU Foundation and ITU Development Foundation, Chairman of ITU ARI Technopark (Sciencepark) Board of Directors, Founding Representative of ITU Development Foundation Schools and an Honorary Chairman of ITU Alumni Council. He was also a member of the Advisory Board on Earthquakes of the Prime Ministry Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency between 2010 and 2017.
Professor Şahin is the founding rector of MEF University, the first fully and only university in the world established entirely based on the flipped learning methodology. He has held this position since March 2013. He is also a member of the Board of MEF Schools.
He has co-authored three books : The Flipped Approach to Higher Education, in 2016, The New University Model: Scaling Flipped Learning in Higher Education, in 2019, and The New University Model: Flipped, Adaptive, Digital and Active Learning (FADAL), also in 2019.  
Professor Şahin is married to Neşe Şahin, a textile designer, and has two children: a son named Efe, born in 2002, and a daughter named Defne, born in 2009.

Personal web page: www.muhammedsahin.org