Prof. Dr. Polat Gülkan METU, Ankara, Turkey Polat Gülkan is currently director of the Earthquake Engineering Research Center at the Department of Civil Engineering of Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Turkey.

Mr. Gülkan is an earthquake structural engineer, and has been active in many areas of global hazard mitigation from 1971. He has been a visiting research scholar at the Earthquake Engineering Research Center of University of California, Berkeley. Other professional appointments have included staff consultancy at Basler and Hofmann of Zürich, Switzerland and visiting professorship at Purdue University. He has served on the Board of Directors of the International Association for Earthquake Engineering (IAEE) during 1996 - 2004, and was appointed for a four-year term as executive vice president of the same organization in 2004. He was also on the Board of Directors of Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) for the period 2005-2008.