Prof. Dr. Mustafa Verşan Kök was born in 1960 and completed his primary school education in the International School of Prague in the Czech Republic. On graduation from Ankara Atatürk High School, he was admitted to Middle East Technical University and completed a B.Sc. in Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering in 1983. Dr. Kök also received his Ph.D. degree in the field of Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering in 1990 from Middle East Technical University. Between 1986-87 he has worked in SHELL company as a well-site operation engineer. In 1993, he joined CNRS in France and later in 1994, he joined ELF company research center.

Dr. Kök was adviser to President of TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) National Contact Point (NCP) and Programme Committee member of Turkey in European Union 6th Framework Programme (FP6) under the priority of Sustainable Development, Global Change and Ecosystems (SUST) and Joint Research Center (JRC) between 2001 - 2006. Dr. Kök was in CNRS-ICARE (Orleans- France) as Visiting Professor between December 2015 and May 2016.

For more than thirty years, Dr. Kök has been mainly involved in energy, drilling and production technologies, enhanced oil recovery techniques and fossil fuels characterization. He has published 192 papers in SCI journals and 73 international conference papers. He has more than 4000 citations for his publications. His h-index is 37 (i-index is 110). Dr. Kök was awarded many national and international awards for more than 35 projects. He holds 2 Science, 20 Research, Achievement and Promotional awards.

He was the Head of the Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering Department of METU in May 2015. He was selected as Dean of the Faculty of Engineering in November 2015. Presently he is the President of the Middle East Technical University since July 2016.

Dr. Kök is the Principal Member of Turkish Academy of Science (TÜBA).