Biography

Ömer Şahin Taş earned his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering at Istanbul Technical University (ITU) in 2011 with high honors, specializing in robotics and control. He also completed a merit-based minor in electrical engineering.

As an undergraduate, he helped develop Turkey's first Formula SAE race car, which competed at FSAE Michigan 2010. He also contributed to Turkey's first autonomous car using intervehicular communication, which participated in the Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge in the Netherlands.

Supported by a TEV/DAAD scholarship, he completed his master's degree in mechanical engineering at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in 2014, specializing in mechatronics and information technology and graduating with "sehr gut" (very good). He conducted his master's thesis research on autonomous vehicle motion planning at FZI Research Center for Information Technology and joined FZI as a research scientist in April 2015.

He received his Ph.D. from KIT in 2022 with summa cum laude, advised by Christoph Stiller and Mykel Kochenderfer. His dissertation, focused on motion planning under partial observability, received the UniDAS Science Award for Germany's best autonomous driving thesis and was a finalist for the IEEE ITS Society Best Dissertation Award. He subsequently visited the University of Toronto as a researcher hosted by Igor Gilitschenski.

From July 2017 to July 2026, he headed the Mobile Perception Systems department at FZI and also served as a research group leader at KIT. In these roles, he led a team of 11 Ph.D. researchers and supported the transfer of research results to industry.

He joined Google Zurich as a researcher in August 2026. He has published in venues including ICLR, ICML, TMLR, and NeurIPS, and his work has received over 1,000 citations (h-index: 14).

Education

• Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, 2022
  • Ph.D. (Dr.-Ing.)
  • Completed with "mit Auszeichnung" (summa cum laude)
• Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, 2014
  • M.Sc. in mechanical engineering
  • Completed with "sehr gut" (very good)
  • DAAD Scholarship during master's
• Istanbul Technical University, 2011
  • B.Sc. in mechanical engineering (High Honors)
  • Minor in electrical engineering (Honors)

Awards

• 2025 - Honorable Mention in the Waymo Interaction Prediction Challenge at CVPR
• 2023 - UniDAS Science Award ("Wissenschaftspreis")
• 2023 - ITS Society Best Dissertation Award Finalist
• 2022 - 2^nd place "Best Paper Award" at IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference
• 2016 - 2^nd place as a team in the Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge 2016