Prof. Dr. Nezih Oktar

In 1977, he earned his medical degree from Ege University Faculty of Medicine with a thesis on "Brain Tumors in the Pediatric Age Group." In 1975, he completed an endocrinology summer internship alongside Prof. Plasevski in Macedonia. In 1979, he attended a micro-neurosurgery course at the Jules Bordet Institute in Brussels under Prof. Brihaye.

Between 1980 and 1981, he received a British Council scholarship for a research fellowship, working with Prof. Symon and Prof. Thomas at the National Hospitals for Neurology & Neurosurgery and the Institute of Neurology, Gough Cooper Dept. of Neurosurgery in London. During the same period, he served as an honorary clinical assistant in neurosurgery clinics at Queen Square, Maida Vale, and various Italian hospitals. He conducted experiments with numerous chemotherapeutic agents, interferon, corticosteroids, and nucleic acids in three-dimensional spheroid brain tumor cell culture studies.

In 1983, he became a specialist in neurosurgery with a thesis titled "In Vitro Chemosensitivity Evaluation in Human Brain Multicellular Tumor Spheroids" at the Department of Neurosurgery at Ege University Faculty of Medicine.

He returned to the Department of Neurosurgery at Ege University in 1988, achieving the title of Associate Professor, and became a Professor in 1997.

Recognizing the importance of a multidisciplinary approach, he founded the Ege Adult Neuro-Oncology Council (ENOK) in 1996, which operates regularly within the faculty. He also chaired the establishment of the Neuro-Oncology Group within the Turkish Neurosurgery Society on December 22, 2001, and served as the president of the Turkish Neuro-Oncology Group (TURNOG) from 2001 to 2005.

In 2014, he was elected as a board member of the Turkish Neurosurgery Academy (TNA), which was established under the Turkish Neurosurgery Society, and served on the board from 2016 to 2018. Prof. Dr. Nezih Oktar is proficient in Italian.