Mehmet Akcin

Country:	USA
Website:	[akcin.net akcin.net]
LinkedIn:	[mehmet Mehmet Akcin]
Twitter:	@mhmtkcn
Formerly a member of the ICANN Staff Featured in the ICANN 50 - London playing card deck

Mehmet Akcin is Founder and CEO of Kapany Networks Inc. He is also working as an advisor to the Group CEO of Turk Telekom International and member of the board of advisors for Seaborn Networks Inc. He frequently attends ICANN Meetings and other Domain name industry events.

He previously held executive roles in various Fortune 500 companies such as Yahoo! , Verizon (Oath) and Microsoft. Mehmet worked as Chief of Staff and Senior Director of Global Network Infrastructure and Services team in Yahoo! before that he was the director of network planning and acquisitions in global network acquisition group at Microsoft. Mehmet also worked at ICANN as Manager of DNS Operations at ICANN and Chief Engineer from 2007 till 2013. Mehmet is also a Referee with the United States Soccer Federation.

Mehmet is a distinguished inventor with 6 granted patents to his name in the areas of Domain Names , Content Delivery Networks and Internet Security.

Career History

Prior to joining ICANN, Akcin worked against much resistance to found IX.PR, the first Internet Exchange Point in the Caribbean. Dr. Oscar Moreno, Director and Founder of Gauss Research Laboratory, assisted him with the project and has since taken it over. At the time, Mehmet was also working as Senior Network Engineer for NIC.PR (July 2005 – June 2006), as Senior Systems and Network Engineer at pharmaceutical company CIQA Inc. (March 2002 – June 2006), and as IT Advisor to the Dean of College of Natural Sciences and the Executive Director of Academic and Administrative Technology at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras (June 2004 – March 2006). He has also been a System Engineer with Geneva.CH's Undernet IRC Network (August 2001 – May 2005), a project created by CERN to help students researching DDoS attacks figure out how to stop them. Akcin moved to Puerto Rico from Turkey in 2002. in Turkey, he worked as a System Engineer and Radio Programmer for Radio Klas, 98.7, hosting the first Turkish radio show about the Internet and Technology (May 1999 – July 2000), and before that, he assisted with the setup and administration of the first linux servers at Istanbul Technical University and Marmara University. He has been working with the Internet in various capacities since 1995, and is considered on of Turkey's Internet Pioneers.

Education

Mehmet is currently attending Columbia University Executive Education on Technology Management, and is expected to graduate in 2021. He received a B.S. in Computer Science from Inter-American University of Puerto Rico-Metropolitan Campus and studied in Harvard University Program on Negotiation executive education programs. He is fluent in Turkish, English, and proficient in Spanish.