Alpan Bek received his undergraduate and graduate education at Bilkent University, Department of Physics. Prof. He worked on "optical properties of low-dimensional systems and integrated photonic circuits" under the supervision of Atilla Aydınlı. He completed his doctorate at the Max-Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Germany and received his degree from EPFL in Switzerland in 2004. During his doctorate, he developed an "apertureless scanning near-field microscope" with 5 nm optical resolution. After his postdoctoral work on nano-plasmonic systems at the University of Munich and on tip-augmented Raman spectroscopy at the Institute of Molecular Biomedicine in Trieste, Ludwig-Maximillian returned to Turkey in 2011 as a faculty member at the Department of Physics at the Middle East Technical University. He continues his research on "environmental photonics" at the Nano-Optics Research Laboratory he founded here. He is a member of the Academy of Science and the winner of the 2013 BAGEP award.