Taskin Kocak

Taskin Kocak received a Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Duke University, Durham, NC in 2001. Prior to his appointment as Dean of the School of Computing and Engineering at Quinnipiac in 2022, he served as Dean of the Robert Savoie College of Engineering and a Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Orleans (UNO), LA. Under Kocak’s leadership, the UNO College of Engineering raised the two largest gifts in its history, leading to the naming of the College of Engineering and its School of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering, respectively. Further, the college successfully gained university and state approval in 2020 for an undergraduate construction management degree program, the college’s first new Bachelor of Science degree offering since 1981. He also held the Huntington-Ingalls Endowed Professorship in Engineering at UNO. Before that, he served as Dean of the College of Engineering and Natural Sciences and (before being promoted to this role) as the Chair of Computer Science and Engineering Department at Bahcesehir University (BAU), Istanbul, Turkey. Previously, he was on the faculty of University of Bristol, England and the University of Central Florida (UCF), Orlando, FL. Before joining the academia, he worked as a design engineer at Mitsubishi Electronic America's Semiconductor Division in Raleigh-Durham, NC.

Kocak’s broad research interests and expertise span the areas of machine learning, computer networks and high-performance computing. At BAU, he had several major research projects such as high-performance GPU computing for 10 Gbps communication systems, smart transportation systems, and smart grid communications. At Bristol, his research activities focused on developing systems and architectures for very high throughput (multi-gigabits per second) wireless networks. At UCF, he contributed significantly to the modeling, simulation, design and implementation of systems and architectures for computer networks. He has over 130 peer-reviewed publications, including 46 journal papers. He served as an associate editor for the Computer Journal published by Oxford University Press as well as the sole guest editor for a special issue of this journal. He served as the lead guest editor for a special issue of the ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems.