Umran Savaş İnan (Turkish: Ümran Savaş İnan;^[4] born December 28, 1950^[3]) is a Turkish scientist at Koç University and Stanford University in the field of geophysics and very low frequency radio science. İnan was the president of Koç University between 2009 and 2021.^[5]

Life and career

İnan received his B.Sc. degree in 1972 and M.Sc. in 1973 from the Middle East Technical University (METU). He conducted his doctoral research during four years at Stanford University, receiving a Ph.D. in 1977 in electrical engineering under the tutelage of Robert Helliwell. İnan later joined the staff of Stanford as research affiliate and in 1982 was appointed as assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering. He subsequently became associate professor in 1985 and then full professor at Stanford since 1992.

In 1997, he was appointed director of Space, Telecommunications and Radio Science Laboratories (STAR) connected to Stanford and continued his duty here until September 2009. During his academic career at Stanford he worked in areas geophysics, near-space, ionospheric and atmospheric physics, radiation belts, electromagnetic wave-particle interaction, and very low frequency radioscience. Inan has had about 50 PhD students so far.

He had been the president of Koç University between 2009 and 2021. Currently, the research group at Stanford University is conducting observations from over 50 different spots on seven continents and also from a variety of world-orbiting satellites. He became professor emeritus at Stanford in 2011, and remains active there along with his duties at Koç University.

İnan has over 323 refereed scientific and technical papers.^[6]

With his brother, Aziz İnan, he has authored three textbooks on electromagnetics:

• Engineering Electromagnetics Archived 2001-02-23 at the Wayback Machine (Prentice Hall 1998)
• Electromagnetic Waves (Prentice Hall 1999)
• Principles of Plasma Physics for Scientists and Engineers (Cambridge Press 2011)

The first two textbooks were then combined into a second edition, Engineering Electromagnetics and Waves, by the same two authors along with Ryan Said.

Membership and awards

İnan has been active member of various organizations since 1973 and he has been awarded by many institutions so far.

Besides being a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the International Radio Science Association, the American Physical Society (APS), the Electromagnetic Academy, the Academy of Tau Beta Pi, the Sigma Xi Academy, and TUBA, İnan was also awarded by Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA with group achievement award in years 1983, 1998 and 2004.

Research at Stanford

Research activities at Stanford include

• Effects of lightning on the ionosphere and magnetosphere
• Precipitating electrons from the radiation belts caused by VLF waves, both natural (lightning) and manmade (VLF transmitters)
• Generation of ELF/VLF waves with the HAARP facility in Alaska
• Wave-particle interactions between ELF/VLF waves and energetic radiation belt particles
• VLF remote sensing of ionospheric disturbances from cosmic gamma-ray sources
• AWESOME ELF/VLF instrument distribution under the International Heliophysical Year
• Investigation of naturally generated chorus and hiss waves in the ELF/VLF band

Inan Peak

Inan Peak rising to 2,451 metres (8,041 ft) 1.15 miles (1.85 km) west of Mount Kempe in the Royal Society Range of Victoria Land, Antarctica was named after him by the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names in 1994.^[7]