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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<title>Orkan Telhan</title>
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<body>
<nav>
<a href="#about">About</a>
<a href="#projects">Projects</a>
<a href="#publications">Publications</a>
<a href="#expertise">Expertise</a>
<a href="#contact">Contact</a>
</nav>
<section id="about" style="text-align: left; padding-top: 120px;">
<img src="imgs/telhan_headshot.jpg" alt="Orkan Telhan headshot" style="width: 180px; border-radius: 8px; margin-bottom: 20px;" />
<h1>Orkan Telhan, PhD</h1>
<p style="max-width: 650px; margin: 0; font-size: 1rem; line-height: 1.6;">
I am a technology executive with 15+ years of experience leading interdisciplinary teams across startups, academia, and industry. As Chief Information and Data Officer at Ecovative, I oversaw AI/ML systems, engineering, and the global data infrastructure for scalable mycelium biomanufacturing. I supported the successful commercialization of <a href="https://myforestfoods.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">MyBacon</a>, Ecovative's flagship meat alternative, and contributed to the R&D of <a href="https://forager.bio" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Forager</a> textiles and foam.
<br><br>
Previously, I was a tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where my work focused on emerging technologies in design and biology. I also co-founded Biorealize, a company developing biomanufacturing prototyping tools, and led the development of industrial automation platforms for complex production environments.
<br><br>
My work bridges data analytics and AI-driven systems to deliver high-impact technologies at scale. I hold a PhD in Design and Computation from MIT and serve as President of the Biodesign Challenge, a global initiative bringing together students, designers, and industry to envision the future of biotechnology through responsible design.
</p>
</section>
<section id="projects">
<h2>Selected Projects</h2>
<div style="display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap; gap: 20px;">
<div style="width: 300px; margin-bottom: 40px; ">
<img src="./imgs/ai_dfc2.png" alt="AI designer, farmer, CFO biomaterials agent interface" style="width: 100%; border-radius: 8px;" />
<h3>AI Designer, Farmer, CFO</h3>
<p>
Developed a multi-agent AI decision-intelligence platform showcased at Biofabricate’s Biofair (2025). The system deployed role-based agents—Designer, Operator, and CFO—to model trade-offs between performance, process efficiency, and cost across complex manufacturing workflows. Beyond interactive demos, the framework integrated retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for technical and market intelligence, AI-based compliance validation for safety and sustainability claims, and evaluation pipelines to benchmark outcomes against engineering and financial KPIs. Users employed the platform to interpret sensor data, optimize production parameters, validate assumptions, and perform techno-economic analyses in real time. The project demonstrated how agentic, transparent analytics systems can enable cross-functional teams to make evidence-based decisions and accelerate the path from research to scalable products.
</p>
</div>
<div style="width: 300px; margin-bottom: 40px; ">
<img src="./imgs/ecovative_foundry.png" alt="Ecovative Foundry" style="width: 100%; border-radius: 8px;" />
<h3>Ecovative Foundry</h3>
<p>
From 2021 to 2023, I led the development of Ecovative’s Mycelium Foundry—the first high-throughput R&D platform dedicated to cultivating and characterizing fungal biomaterials. The Foundry integrated custom hardware, automated cultivation chambers, and real-time sensing systems to enable controlled growth, parameter sweeps, and longitudinal studies of material performance. We designed AI-assisted experiments across substrate, strain, and environmental variables, generating large-scale datasets used to train predictive models and inform downstream scale-up. The platform became central to Ecovative’s material innovation pipeline for food and textile applications.
</p>
<p style="font-size:0.9rem; color:#555;">
<a href="https://shop.ecovative.com/blogs/blog/building-the-first-mycelium-biomaterial-research-platform" target="_blank">Read about the Foundry</a>
</div>
<div style="width: 300px; margin-bottom: 40px; ">
<img src="./imgs/mycelium_compute_chip.png" alt="Mycelium Computer Chip" style="width: 100%; border-radius: 8px;" />
<h3>Mycelium Compute Chip</h3>
<p>
Funded by the DARPA Biological Technologies Office’s AIxBIO initiative in 2024, I led the R&D on a mycelium-based compute chip that explores the conductive and morphological properties of fungal tissue as an analog computational substrate. By tuning growth conditions and dopant uptake, we engineered living and post-growth mycelium to function as physical reservoir computers, capable of transforming temporal signals for machine learning tasks. The project combined materials engineering, biofabrication, and neuromorphic design to prototype a new class of biologically derived inference systems.
</p>
<p style="font-size:0.9rem; color:#555;">
Read preprint: <br><a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.20.671348v1" target="_blank"> bioRxiv: 2025.08.20.671348v1</a>
</div>
<div style="width: 300px; margin-bottom: 40px; ">
<img src="./imgs/data_view1b.png" alt="Farm Harvast Reports" style="width: 100%; border-radius: 8px;" />
<img src="./imgs/data_view3b.png" alt="Product yield and KPI Report" style="width: 100%; border-radius: 8px;" />
<img src="./imgs/data_view4b.png" alt="Treatment Performance Report" style="width: 100%; border-radius: 8px;" />
<h3>Enterprise Resource Management</h3>
<p>
I led Ecovative’s Data Systems and Intelligence team in building a custom enterprise resource management platform to support scaled mycelium manufacturing. The system integrated resource planning, treatment scheduling, harvest tracking, and quality control reporting into a unified data infrastructure. It enabled real-time visibility across operations, standardized production protocols, and supported traceability across substrates, recipes, and material outcomes.
</p>
</div>
<div style="width: 300px; margin-bottom: 40px; ">
<img src="./imgs/mycelium_farming.jpg" alt="Control Systems for Scale Mycelium Production" style="width: 100%; border-radius: 8px;" />
<img src="./imgs/contro_vis.png" alt="Control System Monitoring" style="width: 100%; border-radius: 8px;" />
<h3>Control Systems for Scaled Mycelium Production</h3>
<p>
I developed custom sensing and control systems to automate mycelium cultivation at industrial scale. Designed hardware-integrated platforms with environmental sensors, actuators, and cloud-based SCADA infrastructure. Built real-time data pipelines and dashboards for remote monitoring, predictive analytics, and process reproducibility across Ecovative’s global farm network.
</p>
<p style="font-size:0.9rem; color:#555;">
Patent-pending: <br><a href="https://patents.google.com/patent/US20250176479A1/" target="_blank">US20250176479A1</a> <br> <a href="https://patents.google.com/patent/US20250179413A1/" target="_blank">US20250179413A1</a>
</div>
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<div style="width: 300px; margin-bottom: 40px; ">
<img src="./imgs/material_testing_lab.png" alt="Material Testing Lab" style="width: 100%; border-radius: 8px;" />
<img src="./imgs/material_analytics.png" alt="Material Testing Lab" style="width: 100%; border-radius: 8px;" />
<h3>Material Performance</h3>
<p> Between 2024-2025, I directed Ecovative’s Material Testing Lab, overseeing data collection on mechanical performance, quality metrics, and downstream processing to align with client CTQ criteria. Developed novel testing protocols for mycelium uniformity and managed recipe-linked inventory and process traceability.</p>
</div>
<div style="width: 300px; margin-bottom: 40px; ">
<img src="./imgs/b_reactor_peripherals.png" alt="B_reactor peripherals" style="width: 100%; border-radius: 8px;" />
<img src="./imgs/b_reactor_interface.png" alt="B_reactor interface" style="width: 100%; border-radius: 8px;" />
<h3>Portable Bioreactor</h3>
<p> In 2018, I led the development of Biorealize’s B | reactor—a portable modular biomanufacturing platform that combines incubation, sensing, actuation, and cloud-based control for microbial prototyping. Designed for fast iteration in synthetic biology and fermentation, the B|reactor has been used in brewing fermentation Q/C, materials and bacterial dye innovation, and educational programs.</p>
<p style="font-size:0.9rem; color:#555;">
Patented: <a href="https://patents.google.com/patent/US20210340479A1" target="_blank">US20210340479A1</a>
</p>
</div>
<div style="width: 300px; margin-bottom: 40px; ">
<img src="./imgs/mds_at_bench.png" alt="Microbial Design Studio" style="width: 100%; border-radius: 8px;" />
<h3>Microbial Design Studio</h3>
<p>
I co-founded Biorealize in 2015 and led the design of a closed-loop, automated biofabrication platform for engineering, culturing, and testing genetically modified organisms. The system integrates core wetlab processes—transformation, incubation, lysis, and purification—into a compact hardware–software stack, enabling combinatorial experimentation and predictive, model-based hybrid workflows for synthetic biology. The platform was tested with <a href="https://www.dezeen.com/2018/05/24/mit-media-lab-puma-future-sportswear-design/" target="_blank">PUMA and MIT Design Lab</a> for material innovation.
</p>
<p style="font-size:0.9rem; color:#555;">
Patented: <a href="https://patents.google.com/patent/US10954483B2" target="_blank">US10954483B2</a>
</p>
</div>
<div style="width: 300px; margin-bottom: 40px; ">
<img src="./imgs/liposome_reactor.png" alt="LiposomeReactor" style="width: 100%; border-radius: 8px;" />
<h3>Automated Incubation Platform for Cell-Free Biosynthesis</h3>
<p>
I designed a closed-loop incubation platform for cell-free protein synthesis, enabling the production of functional biomolecules without living cells. As a proof of concept, I developed a fragrance synthesis circuit using DNA that encodes the pathway for farnesol, a key aromatic compound found in sandalwood oil. The DNA was embedded within liposomes together with microbial transcription–translation machinery and triggered to produce the molecule on demand. The project demonstrates the potential for a microfluidic perfumery powered by synthetic biology.
</p>
</div>
</div>
</section>
<section id="publications">
<h2>Selected Publications</h2>
<div style="margin-bottom: 30px; max-width: 600px;">
<h3>Growing Mycelium Neuromorphic Chips for Physical Reservoir Computing
</h3>
<p><strong>Orkan Telhan et al.</strong>. <em>Growing Mycelium Neuromorphic Chips for Physical Reservoir Computing</em>, 2025. Journal Article</p>
<p>
We introduce a neuromorphic computing platform based on PEDOT:PSS-infused mycelium—a biofabricated, electrically active material engineered through parametric growth and polymer infusion. These chips function as physical reservoir computers, transforming time-varying inputs into nonlinear, high-dimensional dynamics suitable for tasks like NARMA-10 prediction. Morphological complexity influences charge transport and memory capacity, providing a novel design axis for analog inference. Each chip hosts up to 16 spatially distinct reservoirs and interfaces with custom analog readout hardware. Scalable using mushroom farming infrastructure, the platform supports biodegradable, single-use machine learning hardware with yields exceeding 3 million chips per growth cycle—offering an alternative to silicon-based AI.
</p>
<p>
<a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.20.671348v1" target="_blank">Preprint @bioRxiv: 2025.08.20.671348v1</a> </p>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 30px; max-width: 600px;">
<h3>Farming Mycelium Textiles</h3>
<p><strong>Orkan Telhan</strong>. <em>Farming Mycelium Textiles—to Designing Mycelium: Exploring the Design Potential of Fungi, edited by Assia Crawford and Jonathan Dessi-Olive.</em>, 2025. Book Chapter</p>
<p>
This chapter introduces a design methodology for scalable mycelium textile production that integrates biological cultivation, materials engineering, and algorithmic optimization. Framed through the lens of relational intelligence, it conceptualizes material farming as an inter-agential process involving human, microbial, and computational actors. The framework positions the mycelium foundry as a site where ecological behavior, machine learning, and performance criteria converge—enabling reproducible, high-throughput fabrication of sustainable, non-plastic materials with complex biological affordances.
</p>
<p><em>In print (please contact to access the draft)</em></p>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 30px; max-width: 600px;">
<h3>Bioreactors as Additive Manufacturing Environments</h3>
<p><strong>Orkan Telhan</strong>. <em>3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing</em>, 2024. Peer-reviewed journal article.</p>
<p>
This article discusses the evolving use of bioreactors, beyond traditional life sciences and bioengineering, in fields such as architecture, fashion, and product design. It explores the role of bioreactors in additive fabrication, highlighting their distinct characteristics compared with conventional digital manufacturing. The discussion is centered on the differences in materializing biologically-active (living) versus biologically-passive, or biologically-derived (nonliving) matter in which ingredients require closed-loop fabrication environments that differ from traditional additive manufacturing tools. Two novel biofabrication platforms, Microbial Design Studio and B | reactor are presented as examples with case studies demonstrating their use in various manufacturing workflows with live cells. The article emphasizes the unique capabilities of bioreactors in engaging with living matter and facilitating complex interactions between biological, algorithmic, and mechanical systems in additive manufacturing.
</p>
<p>
<a href="https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/3dp.2024.0023" target="_blank">Read article</a>
</p>
</div>
</section>
<section id="expertise">
<h2>Expertise</h2>
<ul style="max-width: 600px; margin: 0; font-size: 1rem; line-height: 1.6; padding-left: 1.2em;">
<li><strong>Engineering Leadership:</strong> Cross-functional team building, techno-economic modeling, R&D oversight, agile program management, technical hiring</li>
<li><strong>AI & ML:</strong> Deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn, NumPy, SciPy, Pandas), RAG pipelines (LangChain, Ray), Agentic AI (Flowise, Dify), TinyML/ edge AI models</li>
<li><strong>Data Engineering & Infrastructure:</strong> Cloud data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery), SQL/NoSQL databases, pipelines & orchestration (dbt, Airflow, Fivetran, n8n), containerization and virtualization (Docker); enterprise data integration</li>
<li><strong>Data Visualization & Communication:</strong> Plotly, Matplotlib, seaborn, trame, D3.js, interactive dashboards, scientific visualization</li>
<li><strong>Programming & APIs:</strong> Python, C++, RESTful & GraphQL APIs</li>
<li><strong>Web Development</strong> React, TypeScript, NodeJS, FastAPI, full-stack dashboard prototyping and API integration</li>
<li><strong>Observability & Control Systems:</strong> Real-time sensor networks, SCADA (Ignition), automated validation protocols, distributed large-scale monitoring (Grafana, InfluxDB)</li>
<li><strong>BI & Enterprise Systems:</strong> PowerBI, Quickbase, Salesforce, Airtable, ERP/CRM integration for analytics and executive reporting</li>
<li><strong>Industrial Manufacturing:</strong> Custom bioreactors, fermentation automation, microbial prototyping, mycelium cultivation systems</li>
<li><strong>Hardware & Firmware:</strong> Control systems design, embedded hardware (ESP32, Raspberry Pi), analog electronics, electro-mechanical design, motion planning/path optimization, sensor/actuator integration, CAD design (Fusion 360, Eagle)</li>
</ul>
</section>
<section id="contact">
<h2>Contact</h2>
<p>Email: orkan@design.bio</p>
<p>
<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/orkan-telhan">LinkedIn</a>
</p>
</section>
<footer>
© 2025 Orkan Telhan
</footer>
</body>
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