Gökçin Çınar Announced as the 2025 AIAA Lawrence Sperry Award Recipient

The Michigan Aerospace community is proud to recognize another recipient of a prestigious AIAA honor, with Professor Gökçin Çınar being announced as the winner of the 2025 AIAA Lawrence Sperry Award, in honor of Lawrence B. Sperry, a pioneer aviator and inventor. This honor marks the second year in a row that someone from the University of Michigan community received this acknowledgement, after alumni Michelle Banchy was recognized with the 2024 Lawrence Sperry Award.

“I’m deeply honored to receive the AIAA Lawrence Sperry Award. This recognition reflects the innovative spirit of my mentors, collaborators, and students, who inspire me to push the boundaries of what’s possible for the future of aviation,” commented Çınar upon receiving the award.

This annual award recognizes young professionals under the age of 35 for their notable contributions towards the advancement of aeronautics or astronautics. Specifically, Çınar is being honored with this award for her, “pioneering research and innovative contributions to electrified aircraft systems and sustainable aviation.”

For the past decade, Çınar’s research has focused on electrification in aviation, working with NASA, industry leaders and academia to evaluate advanced concepts such as distributed electric propulsion and hybrid systems powered by batteries or hydrogen fuel cells, and to maximize their system-level benefits. Through these collaborations with NASA and industry partners, she has worked on propulsion system modeling, system-level optimization and fleet-level evaluations for next-generation concepts.

“Modern aircraft are optimized around tightly coupled propulsion and airframe systems, but the transition to new propulsion technologies opens up exciting possibilities for how we design and operate aircraft. These opportunities, however, come with significant challenges and risks. What sets our work apart is our system-level approach, grounded in new computational models,” explained Çınar. “Early in my research, it became clear that existing tools and methods weren’t sufficient to address these challenges, so I focused on developing new ones.”

The tools Çınar has developed integrate aircraft and propulsion system sizing with operations and power management, offering a comprehensive view of future concepts with any source of energy, not just electrification or fossil fuels. Recently, her Integrated Design of Environmentally-friendly Aerospace Systems (IDEAS) Lab released the Future Aircraft Sizing Tool (FAST), an open-source platform designed to enable early-stage design space exploration. FAST has been developed through the labs funding from NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate and the Electrified Powertrain Flight Demonstration (EPFD) project, to advance the understanding of electrification in aviation.

Additionally, Çınar and her team are collaborating with NASA on the NASA Advanced Aircraft Concepts for Environmental Sustainability (AACES) 2050 award, working alongside partners from industry, academia and NASA to explore transformative technologies and designs for a sustainable aviation future.

“These partnerships are critical for turning bold ideas into practical solutions, and we’re excited to continue contributing to the innovative research shaping the future of aviation.”
The Lawrence Sperry Award is given alongside a number of other AIAA Premier Awards, recognizing the most influential and inspiring individuals in aerospace whose outstanding contributions merit the highest accolades. With this recognition, AIAA will present the awards during the Awards Gala on Wednesday, 30 April, 2025 in Washington, D.C.