Technical and Educational Background

A. Serdar Sezen was born in Ankara - Turkey in 1977. He attended the prestigious Ankara Science High School (Founded by the FORD Foundation in 1964) in 1991. In 1994 he started his college education at the Mechanical Engineering Department of the Middle East Technical University, Ankara-TURKEY. He received his BS and MS degrees in Mechanical Engineering in 1999 and 2001 respectively from the same institution. He worked as a TA for courses like Applied Engineering Mathematics, Numerical Methods for Mechanical Enginering and Thermodynamics. He also worked as the system and network administrator for the ME department network hosting for more than 300 computers under two domains.

His MS Thesis was to develop an object oriented visual interactive planar mechanism synthesis and analysis program (QUAD-LINK) under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Eres Soylemez (Dept. of Mechanical Engineering METU). This program implemented mechanism synthesis tasks such as motion, path and function generation for both finitely and infiitesimally separated positions. The program is capable of synthesizing the right mechanism proportions for up to four given kinematic constraints in the design domain. These conditions can be the location, velocity, acceleration and/or jerk of the links at these design points. The designed mechanism can also be analyzed for its dynamic properties and also animated and the design can be retrieved in different output formats. By using Quad-Link it is possible to design a mechanism for any application without even having to know the theoretical details of the synthesis process with simple mouse clicks and keyboard inputs into the graphical user interface. The program also has a detailed integrated help library.

Dr. Sezen received his PhD at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of University of Minnesota in 2006 under the supervisions of Prof. Dr. Brad Nelson (Department chair-Robotics Institute ETH Zurich) and Prof. Rajesh Rajamani (University of Minnesota). His PhD Thesis is titled "Passive Wireless Sensing Strategies for High Frequency Biomedical Sensing Applications".

He is currently holding a postdoctoral research associate position in the Advanced Controls and Microsensors Lab at the University of Minnesota. His current research involves passive wireless sensing strategies for MEMS sensors, design and fabrication of MEMS sensors and actuators and control of MEMS devices. The projects that he was involved in included microrobotics cell manipulation, fabrication of a MEMS cellular force force sensor, pull-in range extension in electrostatic comb-drives by applying control and a novel thermally actuated 2 degree of freedom microgripper. All device fabrication has been done at the Nano-Fabrication Facility of University of Minnesota.

He is also holding an Adjunct Faculty position in the same department and teaching the senior lab Motion Control Laboratory (ME4231).

Serdar is married to Zeynep Sezen who is currently working as a postdoctoral research associate at the Deprtment of Entomology of University of Minnesota.