He conducted his doctoral research during four years at Stanford University, receiving a Ph.D. in 1977 in electrical engineering under the tutelage of Robert Helliwell.
İnan later joined the staff of Stanford as research affiliate and in 1982 was appointed as assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering.
In 1997, he was appointed director of Space, Telecommunications and Radio Science Laboratories (STAR) connected to Stanford and continued his duty here until September 2009.
During his academic career at Stanford he worked in areas geophysics, near-space, ionospheric and atmospheric physics, radiation belts, electromagnetic wave-particle interaction, and very low frequency radioscience.
Currently, the research group at Stanford University is conducting observations from over 50 different spots on seven continents and also from a variety of world-orbiting satellites.