Engin Arik


I first saw Engin Arik back in 1988, on my last year of Lycée, while visiting the Bosphorus university to see if it was suitable for me. Her enthusiasm for teaching and her friendliness to her students captured me immediately. A few years later, I also grow to appreciate her knowledge of physics and thirst for research.

While continuing my PhD with her husband in mathematical physics, I joined her to work at CERN and to setup a local HEP lab. At CERN, she would go for days on bread and cheese to debug a problem, she would stay up until early morning to see the results of her study as if she were not an established professor but a young and eager PhD student. To convert the then empty HEP room at the university, into a real working lab, she had once carried a CAMAC PSU as a "hand luggage" in a Geneva-Istanbul flight.

She was able to "multi-task" and work for different experiments at the same time without neglecting her leadership duty: fighting to get funds. When the government was not able to fulfill our requests, she would contact her colleagues from abroad to find equipment as donations. A good number of her students got their degrees from the local projects on these donated PMTs, scintillating fibers etc. If everything else would fail, she would keep her optimism and would say "Never mind, lets go back to our work" returning to the mathematics of the quark mass hierarchy for example.

One of her dreams was to spread the HEP to a larger community in Turkey. She would try to contact bright people from all universities and channel the available brainpower into our field. She passed away trying to realize this dream.

Gokhan Unel

Univeristy of California - Irvine

OTHER TESTIMONIES

Engin Arik pioneered the modern experimental physics, the so called “counter physics” development.

I was always impressed with Engin Abat's enthusiasm to help and his genuine interest to learn as much as he could.

Engin Arik was the first Turkish physicist that I ever met and over the years she was great collaborator to work with.

Berkol Dogan was almost famous for the warmth of his smile and personality.

Engin Arik believed in science. She believed in particle physics and performed it with enthusiasm.

We owe a great deal to Engin Arik, and we miss her friendship.

Engin Arik's enthusiasm for teaching and her friendliness to her students captured me immediately.

From the first day I met her, I was struck by Engin Arik's cheerfulness and her enthusiasm.