As Professor of Materials Innovation and Design at Delft University of Technology, Elvin has spent two decades pioneering the field of biodesign — where biology, design, and sustainability converge. She founded TU Delft's Biodesign Lab, developed the widely adopted Material Driven Design methodology, and launched the first International Biodesign Conference to bring together researchers, designers, and companies around this emerging field. She is co-editor-in-chief of Biotechnology Design at Cambridge University Press.
Elvin's ambition is to scale biodesign — in academia, in industry, and in society. She believes that designing with living systems is not a niche experiment but the next frontier of materials innovation, and that it needs to move from the lab bench to the factory floor and into everyday life. Through Foamlab, she is doing exactly that. Her mission is to build biodesign into a field with real, lasting impact on how we make things — and what we make them from.
