Avigail Gilad

Avigail is a Master of Architecture candidate at MIT and an Andrea Chegut Fellow, researching infrastructure in extreme environments. Her thesis this fall focuses on Arctic waterways and marine infrastructure, examining where policy, ecology, and the built environment intersect.

Her past research examined architectural histories of the desert, offering a counter-narrative to the science- and policy-driven approaches that dominate work in the Arctic. She has recently moved into construction, working with Shawmut to facilitate the building of MIT's Met Warehouse, and planning for green energy reliance in resource-strapped locations with Crusoe Energy for data centers.

She cares about the Grid, Infrastructures, Systems: the networks, largely invisible, that make extreme and remote environments livable and buildable. She is also co-founder and COO of cortado.bio, a coffee-leather materials startup, winner of the 2024 MIT DesignX Innovation Prize and exhibited at the 2025 Venice Biennale.

Across research, construction, and material inventions, she's drawn to the question of what systems and designs are necessary to building in constrained, extreme conditions?