Prior to joining ODTU, she spent five years as a research scientist at MIT with joint appointments at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and the MIT Sloan School of Management in the Operations Research and Statistics Group. Dr. Ertekin received her Ph.D in Computer Science and Engineering from Penn State in USA with a best thesis award and her B.Sc. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from ODTU in Turkey. Throughout her Ph.D. studies, she has also worked as a researcher in the Machine Learning Group at NEC Research Laboratories in Princeton, NJ USA. In Turkey she had worked at Aselsan in defence industry projects.