Martyr Prof. Dr. İlhan VARANK
Born on 
August 6, 1971, in Zonguldak, Prof. Dr. İlhan Varank is the middle child of the Varank family—a family of three children registered in the Of district of Trabzon province. When he was just 1.5 years old, his family moved to Istanbul, and he completed his elementary, middle, and high school education there. He attended Yedikule Elementary School, where he began his elementary and middle school education in 1977, and graduated from Şehremini High School. In 1990, he was admitted to the Mathematics Education Department at the Necati Bey Faculty of Education, which was then affiliated with Uludağ University. After graduating from university, he went to the United States for graduate studies and completed his master’s degree at Ohio State University in 1998. During his master’s program, he worked as an evaluator at the Ohio SchoolNet and SchoolNet Plus Educational Technology Institute. He completed his Ph.D. in Instructional Systems/Technologies at Florida State University in 2003. During his doctoral studies, he worked as a performance consultant at the Center for Certified Public Management in Florida. Driven by a constant desire to excel in his profession, Prof. Dr. İlhan Varank remained in the United States for a while longer to pursue postdoctoral research. During this time, he also served as a school administrator at a public school in Arizona to gain further experience. In 2003, he returned to Turkey and began working as a Research Assistant at Afyon Kocatepe University, and shortly thereafter was appointed to the position of Assistant Professor.
In 2009, he became department chair of the Department of Computer and Instructional Technologies Education. In 2010, he assumed the position of department chair at the Department of Computer and Instructional Technologies Education at Yıldız Technical University with the title of Associate Professor. In May 2015, he was promoted to the rank of Professor. He continued to serve as department chair until January 2016. As someone who values different perspectives, is curious about different cultures, and strives to be innovative and broaden his vision, he served as a visiting faculty member at the University of Freiburg in Germany in 2005, in 2006 at the University of Turku in Finland, in 2007 at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman, and in 2012 at Fernando Pessoa University in Portugal. With the launch of the FATİH project, he served as an Advisor to the Minister of National Education and as Group Head at the General Directorate of Innovation and Educational Technologies (YEĞİTEK) between 2011 and 2013. Prof. Dr. İlhan Varank, who was married and the father of two children, was martyred during the coup attempt on the night of July 15, 2016. With the hope that we may always keep alive the memory of our professor, whom we lost so tragically and suddenly at the age of just 45...