Sadık C. Artunç, FASLA, FCELA, PLA, PE is a professor who has recently returned to his fulltime faculty position after serving seventeen years as the Head of Department of Landscape Architecture at Mississippi State University (MSU) (January 2007 – December 2023). Prior to his tenure at MSU, he taught at the Robert S. Reich School of Landscape Architecture of Louisiana State University between 2007 - 1981. Sadık has dedicated his academic career to educating students in innovative, humanistic, and environmentally sensitive planning, design, and implementation and to serving as an enthusiastic advocate for the profession and education of professionals. With the highest standards of professional ethics, he has been a successful and very consistent role model for his students and colleagues.
A native of Turkey, Sadık is a naturalized citizen of the U.S.A. He has a B.S. and M.S. in forestry and forest engineering from the University of Istanbul, and a M.L.A. from the University of Michigan. He is a registered landscape architect in the U.S.A. and a registered forester and forest engineer in Turkey. His teaching involves design implementation and construction, site planning and design, and regional planning and design. His professional consulting involves large-scale planning and design with a focus mostly on recreation and tourism, resource planning, and design implementation/construction. He has worked on projects in the United States, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Turkey. Prior to arriving in the United States in 1975, he worked in Turkey as a forester and forest engineer for the Ministry of Forestry, and later as a recreation planner in the Central Planning Office of the National Parks Service and, finally, as the planning director of the Uludağ (Olympus) National Park for the Department of National Parks in Bursa, Turkey.
Sadık has been an active member of various professional organizations and societies since 1981. Always a tireless and enthusiastic promoter of the profession of landscape architecture and ASLA, Sadık served at various leadership capacities and levels: the Louisiana Chapter president (1991); chapter trustee (1996–2001); and finally, as the national vice-president of membership (2002–2004), during which time ASLA membership had a tremendous growth in numbers. Sadık was nominated and ran for the office of President of ASLA in 2005. Sadık was inducted into the ASLA Council of Fellows in 2000. Most recently, he served as the President-elect, President, and Past-President of the CELA. During his three-year service which has been impacted by the COVID, the annual conference was cancelled in 2020, held the first ever virtual annual conference was held in 2021, and the first face-to-face and virtual (hybrid) conference was held in 2022. Also, during his term, the CELA Board of Directors enacted and endowed the Charles Fountain Scholarship for minority students studying landscape architecture.
His teaching, scholarly, and professional activities through ASLA, CELA, CLARB, LAAB, ECLAS, IFLA, and Turkish Society of Landscape Architecture (PEMAT and PEMDER) have contributed to an increased visibility and awareness of the profession. He has over one fifty hundred publications to his credit in refereed journals, proceedings of professional conferences, national registration exams, magazines, and book chapters. He has received twenty-one academic and professional awards during his academic and professional career from his students, his colleagues, and his peers.