About

I graduated from Istanbul Faculty of Medicine in 1989 and completed my specialist training in 1995 in the Department of Anesthesiology and Reanimation of the same faculty. A DAAD scholarship awarded in 1992 took me to several centres in Germany; that period shaped both my professional outlook and the international ties I have kept ever since.

I became associate professor in 2003 and professor in 2009, and worked at Istanbul Faculty of Medicine from 1995 to 2022. Since 2022 I have been with the Acıbadem Healthcare Group, where I head the Department of Anesthesiology and Reanimation at Acıbadem Mehmet Ali Aydınlar University School of Medicine.

What I work on

My field is thoracic surgery anesthesia. Managing a patient's breathing during operations on the lungs, the oesophagus and the mediastinum is among the most physiologically complex tasks in anesthesia. I have worked for years on its most technical problem — one-lung ventilation — and take part in international trials and consensus documents on the subject.

My second focus is postoperative pain management. The success of an operation is not decided in the theatre alone; whether a patient can get up early, breathe deeply and stay comfortable directly affects how quickly they recover.

Perioperative medicine

The idea I have returned to most in recent years is perioperative medicine. It rests on a simple observation: surgery does not begin when the patient is placed on the table and end when the operation is over. The whole process, from preparation beforehand to recovery afterwards, is a single continuum.

I have been appointed Editor-in-Chief of Perioperative Medicine, the international peer-reviewed journal of this field. This site follows the same approach — its sections are organised not by type of operation, but along the patient's own timeline.

Academic work

I am the principal investigator of the PROTHOR trial, a multicentre study comparing protective ventilation strategies during one-lung ventilation; its results were published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine in 2026. I have more than 80 publications in peer-reviewed journals including JAMA, along with book chapters in English and German.

I have held committee roles within the European Society of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care (ESAIC) and the European Association of Cardiothoracic Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care (EACTAIC), and chair the EACTAIC Thoracic Anaesthesia Scientific Committee.