Prof. Dr. Erkan Yıldırım was born in Diyarbakır in 1968. He graduated from Eskişehir Anadolu High School in 1986. After graduating from the Faculty of Medicine at Anadolu University in 1992, he completed his general practice residency in Denizli in 1993. In 1998, he completed his residency training in Thoracic Surgery at the “Siyami Ersek Center for Thoracic, Cardiac, and Vascular Surgery in Istanbul and the Atatürk Center for Pulmonary Diseases and Thoracic Surgery in Ankara.” He began his residency in 2000 at the Thoracic Surgery Clinic of Ankara Numune Training and Research Hospital. During his tenure, he became a senior resident (senior specialist) in 2001. As a Visiting Specialist in Thoracic Surgery, he worked at the University of Zurich (Switzerland) in 2002, the University of Toronto (Canada) in 2004, the University of Leuven (Belgium) in 2008, and Kyoto University (Japan) in November 2012. In 2002, he successfully passed the European Board Certification for Thoracic Surgery (EBTCS) exam held at the 10th Congress of the European Society of Thoracic Surgeons (ESTS), thereby becoming a member of the European Federation of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgeons (FETCS). Prof. Dr. Erkan Yıldırım received the Turkish Board Certification in Thoracic Surgery in 2003. In 2007, he successfully completed the scientific portfolio phase of the “Associate Professorship Examination” in Thoracic Surgery. Between 2007 and 2008, he actively participated in 85 lung transplant surgeries for recipients, nearly 100 organ procurement procedures from donors, and four clinical trials (one of which was entirely his own project) as part of the Lung Transplant Fellowship at the University of Toronto’s Lung Transplant Program in Toronto, Canada. In January 2009, he authored the first clinical study conducted and published abroad on “Lung Transplantation” in Turkey. (“Techniques of Lung Transplantation and Lung Volume-Reducing Surgery” (Proc Am Thorac Soc. 2009 Jan 15;6(1):66–78). He has served as a peer reviewer for the “TGKDC – Turkish Journal of Thoracic, Cardiac, and Vascular Surgery” and the “EJCTS – European Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery” since 2002. He is actively conducting four patent projects in collaboration with the Boğaziçi University Department of Biomedical Engineering.