When Mehmet Demirors was in fourth grade at a primary school in southwestern Turkey, his teacher showed the class how a steam engine worked. “He put the water in the small steam engine of a locomotive,” Mehmet said. “A little while later, the thing started moving and making all kinds of sounds. I was blown away – and that was the beginning of my interest in technology.” Mehmet’s love for technology grew quickly as he explored and read more about all things related to science. “I was always spending my pocket money on technical books,” he said. “I even set a record at my school for borrowing the most books from the school library in a single year.” In his last year of high school, his chemistry teacher demonstrated the nylon rope trick – combining two chemicals in a way that causes polymerization and forms a nylon rope. “That experiment really piqued my interest in chemical reactions. So I went on to study chemistry after high school, eventually earning a Ph.D. in polymer science.”

Chemical process engineering chemical safety and management reservoir engineering