Mehmet Turan Söylemez was born in Turkey in 1971. He received the BSc degree in control and computer engineering in 1991 from Istanbul Technical University (ITU), Turkey, and the MSc and PhD degrees in control engineering from the University of Manchester Inst. of Sci. and Tech. (UMIST), the U.K., in 1994 and 1999, respectively. He is currently a full professor in the Control and Automation Eng. Dept. of ITU. He worked as the vice-chair of Electrical Eng. Dept. between 2003 and 2008, vice-chair of Control and Automation Eng. Dept. between 2008 and 2013, vice dean of Electrical and Electronics Eng. Faculty between 2010 and 2013, the chair of Disaster and Emergency Management Department between 2021-2023, and has been the chair of Railway Eng. Dept. of the Graduate School of Science Engineering and Technology of ITU since 2013. Besides, Dr Söylemez is a founder member and present chair of ITU Centre of Excellence for Disaster Management. Dr Söylemez has been involved in more than 100 industrial projects and several R&D research projects, including the Turkish National Railway Signalling Project, in which he was the project manager for the ITU team, and the National CBTC Signalling Project, in which he led the teams developing ATP and ATO algorithms. He is the author of more than 150 scientific papers and a book entitled Pole Assignment for Uncertain Systems. He supervised 10 PhD and nearly 60 MSc theses. Dr Söylemez has also acted as the co-chair of the Turkish Automatic Control Conference in 2008, 2013 and 2023 (TOK’08, TOK’13 and TOK’23) organized by TOK (Turkish NMO of IFAC) and as the NOC chair of the 1^st IFAC Workshop on Advances in Control and Automation Theory for Transportation Applications (ACATTA 2013) and 14^th IFAC Symposium on Control in Transportation Systems (CTS 2016). Dr Söylemez is a senior member of IEEE and is a voting member in IEEE CBTC and Signalling Standards Committee and IEEE Traction Power Standards Committee. He has been actively working in several technical committees of IFAC including TC 2.2 (Linear Systems), TC 2.5 (Robust Control), TC 7.4 (Transportation Systems) and acted as the vice-chair of IFAC TC 9.3 (Developing Countries) between 2011-2013 and is vice-chair of TC 7.4 (Transportation Systems). He worked as a member of the Administration and Finance Committee of IFAC (2017-2020). He has also been the general secretary of TOK since 2009 and acted as one of the twelve members of the Scientific Committee of Shift2Rail (new name Europe’s Rail) Joint Undertaking of the European Union between 2016 and 2023. He is a co-founder and the general manager of HI-SIM Technology in the technopolis area of ITU.