Gökçin Çınar (pronounced gok-chin chin-r ) is an assistant professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan. She is the Principal Investigator of Integrated Design of Environmentally-friendly Aerospace Systems (IDEAS) Lab. Her research interests include aerospace systems design, integration, and optimization with a special focus on electrified aircraft concepts and sustainable aviation. In her research, she utilizes model-based engineering along with probabilistic and statistical methods to analyze, understand and design the complex system behavior of an aerospace vehicle.

With over a decade of experience in sustainable aviation technologies and eight years specifically in electrified aircraft technologies, Dr. Çınar has secured a diverse portfolio of research funding from government agencies and industry partners. Her contributions have been instrumental in advancing the understanding of system-level benefits and challenges in propulsion system electrification and power and energy management optimization for hybrid electric aircraft.

She co-founded and is leading the Michigan Initiative for Sustainable Aviation (MISA), where she is helping to build a collaborative community of experts to explore multi-disciplinary solutions to aviation’s environmental impact.

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 serves as the General Chair of the Organizing Committee for the 2024 AIAA/IEEE Electric Aircraft Technologies Symposium (EATS) which will be held in conjunction with AIAA Aviation on 29 July - 2 August 2024, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

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.