Hi! My name is Gizem, I'm a synthetic biologist and architect, and I'm working on building self-constructing architectures by design (from tiny living robots to large-scale inhabitable structures).

My broader research focuses on the top-down design of bottom-up self-organizing systems, in both social and biological contexts. This website documents my work on self-organization by design, starting with human social systems (via urban-scale projects done in architecture school), and continuing with synthetic biological systems (via projects at the cellular & tissue scales done in grad school).

Whether it's the design of human-to-human interactions in an urban setting unfolding through the public spaces, or the design of cell-to-cell interactions in a biological tissue unfolding through the genetic and physiological spaces, I found the governing design principles to be very similar when it comes to the top-down design of bottom-up self-organizing systems. You can read more about this in my recent paper on the topic (hyperlinked). More on my intellectual story is below:

 

 

Personal Research Manifesto for the

Top-down Design of Bottom-up Self-organization in Biological Systems

 

Construction in nature is a self-organizing process governed by a set of construction rules embodied within the builders themselves (cells, termites, wasps...) that unfold as these builders interact with one another and their environment. Furthermore, these builders can self-replicate, and in the process, they propagate these embodied construction rules to their progeny, facilitating the bottom-up self-construction of the biological architectures we see in and around us through an unmatched sophistication of decentralized control, spatial computation, and material composition. 

Take, for example, the development of an embryo from that initial single "seed" cell. Within its merely ten microns-wide nucleus, this initial building block of the embryo encapsulates a two meters-long DNA strand, where physically encoded are the instructions required to build a dynamic, multicellular living structure with massively complex structural, functional, and material properties.

This seemingly magical self-construction process of nature is in stark contrast to the traditional construction methods humans have been using for millennia to build diverse architectures, from the primitive hut to the New York skyline. Enchanted by this dichotomy between bottom-up vs top-down construction in nature vs culture, I began taking a closer look at how these self-construction processes unfold in nature, and came to the transformative understanding that beneath nature’s magic, there is in fact a tremendous amount of logic. Furthermore, we now may be able to engineer this underlying logical framework, through tools of synthetic morphogenesis, and thereby harness nature as a rational design medium for architecture.

This realization has forever changed my path as an architect and designer. It meant that by using the principles of human-developed top-down design, we now may be able to steer natural biological self-construction processes towards rationally designed ends, and thereby build self-constructing living architectures by design. 

This passion has empowered me since 2015 to build up my biology knowledge and wetlab skills from ground up, first through a Master's degree in Synthetic Biology with Prof Ron Weiss, then a PhD in (Synthetic) Developmental Biology with Prof. Michael Levin. The more time I spend exploring and forging this path forward, the more I realize how the top-down control of nature’s bottom-up morphogenetic power in this way is giving rise to a new design frontier, one that brings the best of both worlds: top-down rational design of bottom-up autonomous construction. Now, as an architect and synthetic biologist, my intellectual passion is to further explore and forge this new frontier forward and develop synthetic biological structures that can predictably build themselves into target morphologies by design.