Arda Akman was born in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1987 and lived in all three shores of Turkey until graduation from high school in Istanbul in 2004. Akman recalls, “I've never held a toy intact for more than one week at a time and immediately started taking it apart after that. This curiosity led me down paths that I did not even know existed—from high-voltage plasma physics to cancer and Alzheimer’s research.” After receiving undergraduate and graduate degrees in electrical engineering, and through various surprises in life, Akman is now responsible for Hardware Reliability for Google's Self-Driving Car Project. He says, “My main goal is to make sure the self-driving cars have the most reliable high-performance sensing and computation in the world. This involves quiet a lot of breaking and taking things apart, so life is really full circle.”
