Atac Imamoglu earned his BS from the Middle East Technical University in 1985. He then earned an MS and Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1987 and 1991 respectively. After graduating, Imamoglu became an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, becoming a full professor in 1999. In 2002, he moved to ETH Zurich, Switzerland, where he is today.

He is a Fellow of OSA, APS, and the Turkish National Academy of Sciences. He has received a number of awards for his work, including the 2001 Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey Science Award, the 2001 Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Wolfgang Paul Award, and OSA’s Charles Hard Townes Award in 2010 “for his seminal contribution to electromagnetically induced transparency and pioneering work on quantum information processing with quantum dots.”