Metin Türkay is the founder of SmartOpt. Metin holds a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University (1996) and MS (1991) and BS degrees (1989) from Middle East Technical University.

He is currently working at Koç Universty and before joining Koç University in 2000 where he set up Systems Lab, he was a ​principal consultant for optimization technologies at Mitsubishi Corporation Mizushima Research Center. His doctoral work on computational and system theories was selected to be the most innovative thesis among all PhD dissertations completed in US and received the 1997 Ted Peterson Student Paper Award. He is also the recipient of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) Career Award (2005), the TÜBİTAK Encouragement Award (2006), Turkey’s first IBM Shared University Research Award (2007), the IBM Faculty Award (2009) and the Open Collaborative Research Award by IBM Haifa Research (2012).

He set up the Koç-IBM Supply Chain Research Center with funds from the IBM Shared University Research Award. His research focuses on optimization theory, mixed-integer programming, and development of novel solution algorithms for mixed-integer programming problems. He is applying these theoretical developments on the solution of sustainable supply chain management and logistics, the design of transportation system with special emphasis on urban logistics and systems biology. In 2006, he was elected as the Chair of EURO Working Group on Computational Biology, Bioinformatics and Medicine.

He is the İstanbul Representative of Government-University-Industry Working Group of the Ministry of Science, Industry and Technology of the Republic of Turkey.