Before being awarded the Koç University Rahmi M. Koç Medal of Science in her native Turkey, Bilge Yildiz was nervous. But it wasn’t standing in front of an audience of hundreds that stressed the Breene M. Kerr Professor in the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering and of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). It wasn’t having to do interviews with journalists. Rather, it was discussing her research in Turkish. “Two weeks before the award ceremony, I was learning Turkish again,” says Yildiz. Her language of scholarship is English; she came…
