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 IDEAS Lab. She leads research at the intersection of computational systems design, multidisciplinary design analysis and optimization (MDAO), and model‑based systems engineering (MBSE). Her application areas include future aerospace concepts and advanced propulsion architectures, with a special focus on electrified aircraft design. Her group develops digital engineering frameworks and decision‑support tools that connect physics‑based models with data‑driven and machine‑learning methods, alongside emerging AI‑augmented design workflows, to analyze technologies consistently across component, system, and system‑of‑systems scales.

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Dr. Çınar’s research portfolio has received funding from the U.S. government and industry partners on topics including hybrid‑electric and alternative-fuel-based propulsion and thermal management architectures, electrified aircraft design, operations, and fleet integration, and system‑level analyses. Her early work produced the Electrified Propulsion Architecture Sizing and Synthesis (E‑PASS) framework, one of the first tools to enable integrated optimization of propulsion system design, mission trajectory, and power and energy management for hybrid‑electric aircraft. Since then, her group has released multiple open‑source software tools, most notably the NASA‑funded Future Aircraft Sizing Tool (FAST). These open‑source and in‑house capabilities offer integrated modeling environments that link requirements, architectures, disciplinary analyses, and operations through MBSE and MDAO.

She is the recipient of the 2025 AIAA Lawrence Sperry Award and the 2024 SARES Young Scientist Award for her contributions to design space exploration and optimization of electrified aircraft concepts. The Lawrence Sperry Award is one of AIAA’s premier early‑career honors, presented annually to one young professional for a notable contribution to the advancement of aeronautics or astronautics. She has also co‑authored several award‑winning publications on electrified aircraft design and optimization.

Prior to joining the University of Michigan, Dr. Çınar was a Research Engineer at Georgia Institute of Technology’s Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory (ASDL), where she led government‑ and industry‑funded research projects on future aircraft technologies, electrified propulsion systems, and MBSE-enabled aircraft design. She holds Ph.D. and M.Sc. degrees in Aerospace Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a B.Sc. in Aerospace Engineering from Middle East Technical University.

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 served on the organizing committee for the AIAA/IEEE Electric Aircraft Technologies Symposium (EATS) since 2019.