Efekan Kokcu came to the UCF Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Computational Research Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he conducted research as a postdoctoral fellow. He received his doctoral degree in quantum computation from the physics department at North Carolina State University, after he achieved M.Sc. Degree in physics from Bilkent University, Turkey.

While his main research topic is quantum computing, his research interests can be listed as –but not limited to—the following: quantum algorithms for Hamiltonian simulation — simulation of physical systems, Lie algebraic methods for quantum computation, variational quantum algorithms and their trainability, quantum error mitigation and error correction.