I was born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1987. My full name is Mehmet Arda Akman, but I go by Arda. First names in Turkey are usually treated like middle names in the US – rarely used. Mehmet is my maternal grand-father’s first name – very cliche to give your child your father’s name 🙂
I lived in 5 cities and went to 8 different schools until I graduated from high school (Kabatas Erkek Lisesi) in 2004. We lived in all coasts in Turkey, I spent my childhood in playing in/around naval bases.
I have been living in the US since 2004, and as of 2019 I’m a proud naturalized US citizen.
I studied electrical engineering for my undergraduate and plasma physics for my graduate work at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. I built cool (literally and figuratively) atmospheric plasma jets and vacuum plasma chamberswith pulsed high voltage sources using Helium.
Throughout high school and college, I rowed competitively in all boat categories – yes all of them (1x through 8- ) I substituted gravel and mountain biking for rowing since moving to Santa Cruz, CA in 2015.
I’m married to Dr. Meredith McPherson. We have a lovely daughter Olivia.
Brief timeline of my professional career
I have always taken things apart as far back as I can remember. So finding my calling at Tesla out of grad school was a great match for me. I worked on the original Model S focusing on powertrain reliability (inverters, chargers, motors, etc) Blew up a lot of those components during reliability testing 🙂
A couple of year later I went over to the autonomous vehicle world at what was called Google Self Driving Car project at time (now called Waymo) for 7 years making the most capable sensing, compute and actuators in the world for automotive use. I loved talking to people about this project back in the day so much. Here is a video from a Father’s Day talk at Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. As of 2024, these cars whizz around SF, LA, Phoenix, Austin with no driver in the front seat.
I spent a couple of years at Rivian building the propulsion hardware reliability function for R1 and Amazon Delivery Vans.
Learned a tiny bit about aerospace at Astra and how hard it is to make things reliable, cheap and high performance.
Now, I lead system testing at Wayve.
Arda Akman 