Ümit Barış Kutman

Ümit Barış Kutman is an assistant professor at the Institute of Biotechnology of Gebze Technical University, where he leads the Plant Biotechnology, Physiology and Nutrition Lab. He has served as deputy director of the institute since 2018 and as head of the biotechnology department and programme coordinator since 2023.

He took his bachelor’s degree (2005) and his doctorate (2010) in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering at Sabancı University; his doctoral work with İsmail Çakmak on the interaction between nitrogen and zinc nutrition in wheat is widely cited in the biofortification literature. He continued as a postdoctoral researcher at Sabancı University (2010-2013) and at the University of California, Davis (2013-2015), then taught at Konya Food and Agriculture University between 2015 and 2017 before joining GTÜ in 2017. At UC Davis he studied the physiology of salinity stress in almond in two projects funded by the Almond Board of California (2014-2016), and led the second, on salinity, nitrate leaching and irrigation strategies that limit soil salinization, as principal investigator.

His research covers mineral nutrition of plants, zinc and nitrogen interactions, biofortification, abiotic stress tolerance, mycorrhizae and root endophytes. In recent years the lab has also worked on soilless and vertical farming, where plant nutrition is the main lever on yield and quality.