Ilker Demirkol is currently working as Associate Prof. in the Dept. of Mining, Industrial and ICT Engineering at Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya. Demirkol received his B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Engineering from the Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey. Over the years, he has worked in a number of research laboratories and corporations, where he has held several positions as Network Engineer, System and Database consultant, or Lecturer.

On top of his 11 years of industrial experience, Dr. Demirkol has an extensive research experience through the 20+ research projects he has participated at institutions in Europe and USA. The total budget of these projects amount to more than 25M€, while he has been the scientific coordinator in three of the European projects (2 H2020 and 1 FP7 projects) and project coordinator in one European project. The quality of his research has been acknowledged through his 30+ papers published in Q1-indexed journals and ~50 peer-reviewed international conference publications. He has generated intellectual property through 1 granted and 3 filed patents.

He has been providing academic services vigorously, taking part in the technical program committees of 40+ international conferences and continuously acting as reviewer for 20+ renown journals in the area. Dr. Demirkol currently is the Series Editor of IEEE Communications Magazine and has been an editor of MDPI Sensors Journal (in 2 Special Issues) and of International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks. He has contributed to the FP7 and H2020 framework programmes as panel chair, project evaluator and reviewer. Dr. Demirkol has been awarded the Senior Membership by IEEE in 2014, and accredited as Contratado Doctor by ANECA in 2012 and with Recerca by AQU in 2019.

Since 2008, Dr. Demirkol has been supervising researchers. His industrial experience as Network Engineer, System and Database Consultant has contributed significantly to his project management and student supervision skills. He worked with 20+ PhD and 20+ MS students, producing publications with almost all of them. Following his continued support and dedication to help advise graduate students and researchers, his efforts were recognized through the "Best Mentor Award" in 2010 at University of Rochester, NY, USA. His research targets communication protocol engineering in wireless networks, mainly for mobile networks, Internet of Things, and molecular networks.