Prof. Dr. Fatih Mehmet Botsalı’s connection with mechanical engineering began long before his university years. Born in Konya in 1955, he worked at his family’s cotton-spinning factory while continuing his high school education and became closely involved in responding to machinery failures. Years later, he would recall that this early experience with machines had led him, almost without realizing it, toward mechanical engineering.

In 1973, Botsalı entered the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Middle East Technical University and completed his undergraduate studies in 1978. During his student years, he also worked on the design and manufacture of textile machinery in a small workshop established with his family, combining theoretical knowledge with practical engineering experience. He completed his master’s degree at METU, began his doctoral studies there, and later received his PhD from Selçuk University.

Botsalı began his academic career in 1978 and taught a wide range of courses, including Statics, Dynamics, Machine Dynamics, and Automatic Control. He became an associate professor in 1999 and a full professor in 2005. He served at Selçuk University and Konya Technical University and retired from the university in 2022.

Professor Botsalı believed that engineering education should go beyond theoretical knowledge and should enable students to interpret engineering problems and develop practical solutions. Alongside his academic work in the field of Theory of Machines, he served as the coordinator of the 10th National Symposium on Theory of Machines, held at Selçuk University in 2001, and continued to support the Theory of Machines community in the following years. Through his book “Teori ve Problemlerle Makina Dinamiği” (Machine Dynamics: Theory and Problems), he also made a valuable contribution to Turkish-language scientific literature.

One of the defining features of his professional life was his continuous effort to connect academic knowledge with practice. Through his roles at the Turkish Standards Institution, Konya Teknokent, and later InnoPark, he contributed to standardization, R&D, technology transfer, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Throughout his career, he shared his knowledge and experience with many students, researchers, industrial organizations, and young entrepreneurs.

A sentence he used at the end of an interview in 2017 perhaps best summarizes his long professional life: “I love my profession very much.” Prof. Dr. Fatih Mehmet Botsalı left behind not only academic work and administrative achievements, but also a valuable professional legacy devoted to transforming knowledge into practice and sharing it with future generations.

Assist. Prof. Dr. Abdullah Çakan