Dr. Gökçin Çınar (pronounced goeck-chin chin-r ) is an Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan and the Director of the Integrated Design of Environmentally-friendly Aerospace Systems (IDEAS) Laboratory. She focuses on the design, integration, and optimization of aerospace systems, with an emphasis on sustainable aviation and electrified propulsion technologies. Her work integrates physics-based and data-driven modeling, probabilistic design, and systems engineering principles to develop computational methods for optimizing the system-level benefits and performance of future flight concepts.

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Dr. Çınar is the recipient of the 2024 International Sustainable Aviation and Energy Research Society (SARES) Young Scientist Award and has authored AIAA and IEEE best papers for her novel contributions to design space exploration and optimization of electrified aircraft. She is the co-founder and leader of the Michigan Initiative for Sustainable Aviation (MISA), which fosters multidisciplinary collaboration to address aviation’s environmental challenges.

Prior to her role at Michigan, Dr. Çınar worked as a Research Engineer at Georgia Institute of Technology where she oversaw a range of government and industry funded research projects on future aircraft technologies, green aviation, electrified aircraft and its propulsion subsystems, thermal management systems, and model-based systems engineering.

Dr. Çınar holds Ph.D. and MSc. degrees in aerospace engineering from Georgia Tech, and a Bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from Middle East Technical University. Her doctoral dissertation titled “Methodology for Dynamic Sizing of Electric Power Generation and Distribution Architectures” was conducted in consultation with Prof. Dimitri Mavris at Georgia Tech. As part of her Ph.D. work, she developed a parametric, physics-based novel aircraft design and analysis framework and a software called “Electrified Propulsion Architecture Sizing and Synthesis (E-PASS)”. E-PASS has since enabled various new research topics funded by NASA, AFRL, and Boeing.

Dr. Çınar is a senior member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), and a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). She is the Chair of AIAA’s Electrified Aircraft Technology Technical Committee, and has been serving in the Organizing Committee for the AIAA/IEEE Electric Aircraft Technologies Symposium (EATS) since 2019.

Dr. Çınar is also passionate about science communication. Since 2016, she has been involved in outreach activities to promote STEM and gender equality in STEM. As part of this outreach, she owns a YouTube channel (only in Turkish) and gives invited talks and seminars at high schools, universities, and local and social media platforms.