A. Nejat Ince

Biography

A. Nejat Ince was born in Bodrum, Türkiye, on November 16, 1928. He received his B.Sc. and Ph. D degrees in Electrical Engineering in 1952 and 1955 from the Universities of Birmingham and Cambridge, England, respectively. At Cambridge he carried out research on electroluminescence and related effects and made significant contributions to the understanding of this phenomenon.

Dr. Ince's career changed a course in 1956 from research in solid-state physics to communication. After a period of five years when he was involved in the planning and design of national long-line networks and broadcasting, in 1961 he joined SHAPE (NATO) Technical Centre (STC) in the Hague, The Netherlands, where his scientific and engineering career continued until November 1978 and got him involved, inter alia, in the development of almost every international communications and information system for NATO. From 1961 to 1968, Dr. Ince worked as a scientist and Head, Radio group and was engaged in studies related to air-to-ground, meteor-burst and groundwave propagation and systems. Together with some of his staff, he designed and built satellite earth stations at UHF and X-bands and studied multiple-access methods, precipitation effects, antenna and power control techniques and earth station design.

During 1966-1970, he took a leading part in the system planning and engineering of an extensive satellite system for NATO, which has been operating successfully since 1970. In the early seventies, he organized and led the design effort of the third generation of satellites (NATO III) which were launched in the period 1976-1978 to replace the original NATO II satellites.

In 1968, Dr. Ince became Chief of The Communications Division at STC and held this position until November 1978 when he joined Western Union Telegraph Company as Assistant Vice President for Advanced Development. His major achievement during this period has been his contributions to the concept development and the system engineering of an automatically switched, distributed network for NATO, called NICS, integrating all services and using terrestrial and satellite links both for access and internodal networks. Together with his staff he developed methodology and traffic and network models for the study and specification of minimum-cost distributed networks, adaptive routing and associated signalling systems and the switch architecture, all allowing a progressive digitalization of the network and operation within an an analog/digital hybrid environment. During this period Dr. Ince also led several other study efforts which included the specification of a new generation of satellites, with on-board processing and multi-beam antennas, to be launched in the mid-eighties, and code-division multiplexing systems for use on satellite and HF radio links.

Dr. Ince, a Fellow of IEEE, held a professorship in Türkiye (since 1966) and was an active member of several scientific and technical societies in Europe and the USA. He was the program chairman for two international symposia on EM-Wave scattering and scatter communications. He was the editor of and contributor to five books and the author of over fifty technical articles and reports.

In 1952, Nejat Ince married Thea Messie; they have one son and two daughters. They both enjoyed music, photography and reading.