It’s no exaggeration to say he was one of the fathers of Turkish industrialists in the United States. He was the inventor of adjustable steel shelves that feature uprights with integrated, roll-formed back-panel channels, widely used in the United States and Europe. This revolutionized the retail industry! Muammer Ahmet Öztekin (MAO) was born in Niğde, Turkey on November 10th 1925 to Ahmet Hamdi & Emine Öztekin. His youth was spent in İzmir & İstanbul at which point he came to the USA in 1949 to further his education because the rest of the worlds education systems were still recovering from the war. He first attended the University of Michigan before transferring to the University of Alabama.

By Esra Ürkmez - Turkish food world lost its biggest ambassador in America. People who knew Orhan Ağabey will sympathize with me on how hard it is to summarize such a genius, an artist, a perfectionist in few paragraphs, but I will try and do my best as also being his friend and his old-time employee. Chef Orhan, son of a surgeon father, was born in Istanbul, Turkey and raised in Adana. He moved to the United States in 1977 due to growing political turmoil in Turkey at the time. His adventure in the States started with working as a busboy and reached a point where he became an ambassador of Turkish food with the restaurants he opened in New York, Deniz, Bi Lokma, Dervish, Efendi, Francela, Sip Sak, and Lokanta.

Turkish-American scientists and scholars have great success and achievements in the last year. Undoubltly, the most successful and known scientists are the husband-and-wife team behind the leading vaccine to solve Covid-19. The German company BioNTech, founded by Dr. Uğur Şahin and Dr. Özlem Türeci, has teamed up with Pfizer on a vaccine that was found to be more than 90 percent effective. Beside Şahin and Türeci, several Turkish-American scientists and scholars also draw attention in the academic circles of the U.S.

Unity Bancorp, Inc. Clinton is a 19-branch-bank headquartered in New Jersey. It operates in Bergen, Hunterdon, Middlesex, Somerset, Union, and Warren counties of New Jersey as well as in Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania. Three Turkish executives work in the bank, which has total assets of 2 billion dollars. Emre Haşmet, Evrim Çiçek and Nihal Birdir are a gateway to the Turkish-American community at the bank with nearly 200 employees.
Evrim Çiçek, who previously had career experiences at national banks such as PNC and Chase, has been working as the regional manager at the bank since February 2018. Çiçek graduated from The School of Economics, Dumlupinar University in Turkey and had a master's degree in accounting and finance at DeVry University in the US. She worked as deputy branch manager for six years in the Warren, New Jersey branch of JP Morgan Chase, one of the leading banks in America, and worked as a branch manager at PNC Bank between 2014 and 2018. Çiçek joined the Unity Bank family in January 2018 and got promoted to regional manager in May 2020. After gaining experience in big national banks, she considers Unity Bank, which is classified as a community bank, as a warm and friendly environment. "While working in big banks, you do not have much opportunity to use initiative. Here, the customer-banker relationship is more intimate" she says.