10/02/2026
Sabancı University Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences continues to offer students interdisciplinary and comprehensive academic content with five new courses launched in the Spring Semester of 2025-2026.
The new courses opened for the Spring Semester and the faculty members who will teach these courses are as follows: Ogün Adebali – Evolution, Hayriye Ünal - General Chemistry for Engineers, Murat Fadıloğlu – Production Dynamics and Control, İnanç Arın - Large Language Models: Theoretical Foundations and Practical Applications, and Özlem Salehi Köken – Quantum Programming II.
EVOLUTION
BIO 460-560 - Ogün Adebali
In this new course by Ogün Adebali, the fundamental concepts of evolutionary biology are covered in six units. The first unit explains the historical development of evolutionary thought and how phylogenetic trees are interpreted. The second unit examines how evolution works through mechanisms such as mutation, natural selection, genetic drift, and gene flow. The third unit discusses speciation processes and how biodiversity emerged using the Evo-Devo approach, while the fourth unit evaluates the evolutionary consequences of sexual selection, cooperation, and interspecies interactions. The fifth unit examines the history of life, major evolutionary transitions, and the macroevolutionary framework of mass extinctions, and the sixth unit explores human evolution in light of fossil and genetic evidence, and the relationship between evolutionary theory and health and ethics.
GENERAL CHEMISTRY FOR ENGINEERS
CHEM 212 – Hayriye Ünal
Hayriye Ünal's CHEM 212 course is an undergraduate course that introduces the fundamental principles of chemistry, emphasizing quantitative problem-solving and real-world engineering applications. The laboratory section of the course serves as a corequisite, reinforcing the topics covered through experiments, measurements, and data analysis.
PRODUCTION DYNAMICS AND CONTROL
IE 435 – Murat Fadıloğlu
Murat Fadıloğlu's new course, IE 435, aims to teach how variability, bottlenecks, and control logic determine the rhythm (performance) of modern production systems, going beyond just basic assembly line balancing.
The course's core learning modules include:
Factory site physics
Push-pull systems: MRP and Kanban
Lean manufacturing and waste reduction
Performance evaluation with Python
LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS: THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS AND PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS
CS 455/CS 555 – İnanç Arın
İnanç Arın's new course comprehensively examines Large Language Models (LLMs) within the framework of their fundamental technologies, application areas, and advanced methods for their deployment, fine-tuning, and evaluation. Students prepare for the latest research topics and practical applications in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence-based systems; by the end of the course, they will be able to design, develop, and evaluate complex LLM applications in real-world scenarios ranging from personalized chatbots to AI agents.
QUANTUM PROGRAMMING II
CS 440 - Özlem Salehi Köken
Özlem Salehi Köken's CS 440 course builds upon the fundamental principles of quantum computing, addressing advanced topics and applications. It introduces basic methods in quantum optimization, cryptography, and machine learning, while also covering practical aspects of quantum programming such as circuit transpilation, noise modeling, and error mitigation. The course emphasizes the practical programming and implementation of quantum algorithms, aiming to demonstrate how these methods utilize quantum phenomena to solve complex computational, optimization, and security problems. Thus, it provides students with both practical experience and an algorithmic perspective for real-world applications.
