Orkan Telhan, PhD

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 global data infrastructure for scalable mycelium biomanufacturing. I specifically supported the commercialization of MyBacon and the research and development of material products for Forager.

Previously, I was a tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where my work focused on emerging technologies in design and biology. In parallel, I co-founded Biorealize, a company developing fermentation-based prototyping tools, and led the development of industrial automation platforms for complex production environments. My work bridges software, hardware, and intelligent systems to deliver high-impact, sustainable technologies at scale. I hold a PhD in Design and Computation from MIT and serve as President of the Biodesign Challenge, a global competition that brings together students, designers, and industry to envision the future of biotechnology through design.

Selected Projects

Ecovative Foundry

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.

Control Systems for Scale Mycelium Production

Control Systems for Scaled Mycelium Production

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.

Patent-pending:
US20250176479A1
US20250179413A1

Enterprise Resource Management

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.

Mycelium Compute Chip

Funded by the DARPA Biological Technologies Office’s AIxBIO initiative, 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.

Material Performance

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.

Portable Bioreactor

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.

Patented: US20210340479A1

Microbial Design Studio

As co-founder and CTO of Biorealize, I 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 PUMA and MIT Design Lab for material innovation.

Patented: US10954483B2

Automated Incubation Platform for Cell-Free Biosynthesis

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 module that demonstrates how genetically engineered bacteria can produce aromatic compounds like farnesol found in sandalwood oil.

Selected Publications

Growing Mycelium Neuromorphic Chips for Physical Reservoir Computing

Orkan Telhan et al.. Growing Mycelium Neuromorphic Chips for Physical Reservoir Computing, 2025. Journal Article

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.

Please contact to access the pre-print draft

Farming Mycelium Textiles

Orkan Telhan. Farming Mycelium Textiles—to Designing Mycelium: Exploring the Design Potential of Fungi, edited by Assia Crawford and Jonathan Dessi-Olive., 2025. Book Chapter

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.

In print (please contact to access the draft)

Bioreactors as Additive Manufacturing Environments

Orkan Telhan. 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing, 2024. Peer-reviewed journal article.

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.

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