Rate My Professor Mukremin Kilic

Mukremin Kilic is the Ted and Cuba Webb Presidential Professor of Astrophysics & Cosmology in the Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Oklahoma. He earned a B.Sc. from Bogazici University in 1999 and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2006. Kilic's research specializes in identifying and characterizing the white dwarf population in the solar neighborhood, including single white dwarfs and double white dwarf systems. His team has identified binary white dwarf systems with orbital periods as short as 12 minutes, which will merge in a few million years. These discoveries enable precise constraints on white dwarf evolution through gravitational wave detections by the upcoming LISA mission.

Kilic also examines the formation and fate of planetary systems around Sun-like and intermediate-mass stars, leveraging white dwarfs as remnants to study late-stage stellar evolution effects. He employs ground- and space-based telescopes to detect planetary companions and debris disks around white dwarfs. His contributions have advanced understanding of post-main-sequence planetary systems. With over 8,700 citations and an h-index of 53 on Google Scholar, key publications include "The merger fraction of ultramassive white dwarfs" (MNRAS, 2023), "The Discovery of Two LISA Sources within 0.5 kpc" (ApJL, 2021), and "The 100 pc White Dwarf Sample in the SDSS Footprint" (ApJ, 2020). Awards and honors encompass the Regents’ Award for Superior Research and Creative Activity (2026), Carl T. Bush Lectureship (2023-2025), Ted and Cuba Webb Presidential Professorship, and selection for NASA's ULTRASAT Participating Scientists Program to search for planets around white dwarfs.