Biography

Tekin Ozbek (born on July 8, 1991 – Istanbul) started his music education with Okan Demiris when he was four. After taking piano lessons for a year, he started studying piano with Nihan Atlig Simpson (Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University) for 12 years, 3 of which included studies in harmony and counterpoint. After studying “introduction to conducting” (figured bass, orchestration, instrumentation, transcription, partition reading and writing, musical analysis) with Babur Tongur (conductor/composer) for 3 months, he continued to take piano lessons from a concert pianist and teacher, Hulya Ardic (MSFAU) for a year. Currently, he is studying music at Carleton University's School of Music. He has composed several pieces for solo string instruments, solo piano, and a set of toccatas for the organ, as well as variations for other pieces. Besides the piano, he plays the harpsichord and organ, and he owns a three-manual Johannus organ with 48 stops. His piano, harpsichord and organ repertoire can be found here.

Meanwhile, he started learning QuickBasic at the age of 12, and VisualBasic.NET at the age of 15. He wrote 3 projects which exceed 50,000 lines of code in total, in 3 years. He has also learned Perl, Python, PHP and SQL programming. Currently he is the Author and Assistant Database Manager of the Dispatch Officer project which uses VB.NET for the application, and PHP/MySQL for the web interaction. Lately, he has been developing more technical programs, such as a bandwidth statistics monitor and a process killer. At the moment, he is doing a minor in Computer Science at Carleton University. He can fluently program in PHP, Python, VB.NET, MySQL and Java.

He gained interest in aviation during his high school years. He flies a Cessna 172/182 with his father, and he joined the International Virtual Aviation Organization (IVAO) in late 2005. After starting in the Turkish Division, he moved to Bulgaria, Canada and finally to the US Division. He got to be one of the first controllers in IVAO to get a Oceanic Controller Rating for Gander Oceanic Radio (CZQX). He is currently the US Division Webmaster (since August 2009).