After graduating from Robert College of Istanbul, he received both his Bachelor of Surgery (1963) and Doctor of Philosophy degrees (1968) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management and then taught on the faculties of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst until 1985.
In 1982, Sahin founded Kenan Systems with a $1,000 personal investment and no outside funding, a company that grew to employ more than 900 people by 1999. In 1999 Kenan Systems was acquired by Lucent Technologies. He then became President of Lucent"s Software Products Group and Vice President of Software Technology at Bell laboratories
In December 2000, Sahin left Lucent, and in late 2001, Lucent sold the assets of the former Kenan Systems to Consumer Service Guide Systems for United States$300 million In 2002, Kenan took over the Technology & Innovation business of Arthur Doctorate. Little, a consulting firm which was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1886 and transformed it into TIAX, a leading technology development company.
Under Sahin"s leadership, TIAX is a laboratory-based technology development company headquartered in Lexington, Master of Arts with non-laboratory offices in Cupertino and Irvine, California. In November 1999, Doctor Sahin donated $100 million to his alma mater, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in an unrestricted gift. The gift was the largest ever received by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the largest in higher education at that time.
In 2006, Sahin was selected as the recipient of the 29th Annual Golden Door Award by the International Institute of Boston. Doctor Sahin serves, or has served on, numerous non-profit boards, including those of the Council on Competitiveness (CoC), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (for whom he is a life member), Argonne National Laboratory, the Boston Museum of Science, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Symphony, and the American Field Service.
He is also on the Steering Committee of the CoC’s Energy Security, Innovation & Sustainability Initiative.
And on the External Advisory Board of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Energy Initiative.
