After taking his B.Sc. degree in Chemical Engineering program at the Middle East Technical University in 1991, Ertan completed Masters study on “Control Configuration Selection for a High-Purity Industrial Distillation Column with Side Stream” under the supervision of Prof. Canan Ozgen at the same university and department in 1993.

Between 1993 and 2003, Ertan gained experience in industry. He worked mostly in the Turkish defense industry as a Research Engineer, Process Engineer, and finally as a Project Coordinator.

In August 2003, Ertan joined WPI to work towards a PhD in the Heat and Mass Transfer group. He worked on fixed bed reactor applications including verification of CFD simulations, heat transfer, and coupling of CFD and reaction engineering methodologies. Here you can see a picture of Ertan, who is standing in front of equipment that has nothing to do with his research, but that's where the Dept. took photographs that year.

In August 2007, Ertan successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation, "CFD Simulation of Transport and Reaction in Cylindrical Catalyst Particles", which is available online. He then spent 2 months as a postdoctoral fellow in our group, before leaving to take up a position as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Artifical Organ Laboratory, Department of Surgery, University of Maryland School of Medicine. After a little more than 2 1/2 years there, he took employment with HeartWare Inc. in Miami Lakes, Florida. He was promoted to Principal CFD Scientist in that company in 2013.