Neri Oxman has recently hit the headlines for her rumoured romance with actor Brad Pitt, but she is already something of a name for any design, architecture, and technology enthusiast out there.

So let’s take gossip as a starting point to learn more about Neri Oxman as prestigious architect and designer: an ode to stunning beauty, intellect and creativity, she is currently professor at the MIT Media Lab and previously showcased her works at the MoMA, Centre Pompidou, and a number of internationally acclaimed museums and galleries.

Brad Pitt is indeed a big architecture fan himself, so no wonder that he established the Make It Right Foundation back in 2007, a non-profit home-building operation aimed to provide affordable dwellings communities in need – and, also, the reason for Pitt’s recent visit to the MIT last November.

Born 1976 in Haifa, Israli, by prestigious architect parents Robert and Rivka Oxman, she soon switched from the Hadassah Medical School to styling architecture between Jerusalem and London, until she moved to Boston in 2005 to join the architecture PhD program at MIT with a thesis on material-aware design. Here, she launches an interdisciplinary research project named materialecology, conceived to experiment with “generative design”. On becoming a professor in 2010, Oxman founded the Mediated Matter research group at the MIT Media Lab, thus expanding her collaborations into biology, medicine, and wearables.

She later married Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov, from whom she separated in 2016 – the same year she started the magazine Journal of Design Science.

Grown up "between nature and culture”, Oxman proposed developing a “material ecology” and conceiving the world and environment as both organisms, changing regularly and responding to use. She supports a "holistic perspective” characterized by property gradients and multi-functionality in contrast with the assumption that parts are made from single materials and fulfill predetermined functions”, the latter being deeply rooted in design and enforced by the way that industrial supply chains work.

According to Neri Oxman, the modern world needs to pursue "a shift from consuming nature as a geological resource to editing it as a biological one”; to this end, her popular TED talk on designing "at the intersection of technology and biology" was extremely inspirational and avant-garde.

She endorsed her research path with spectacular installations such us the widely celebrated Silk Pavilion – an installation designed in 2013 and woven by 6,500 free-ranging silkworms on a nylon-frame dome; or the Synthetic Apiary, a room-sized installation built in 2015, studied the behavior of bees in an entirely indoor environment, including how they built hives in and around different structures. This was developed in collaboration with a beekeeping company, as a way of testing possible responses to colony loss, and exploring how biological niches could be explicitly integrated into buildings.

Oxman has also worked extensively with various 3D printing techniques, and released a wide array of projects ranging in scale from enclosures and large furniture, to artwork and clothes, to biocomposites, artificial valves, and DNA assembly.

In 2015, she earned Fast Company's award for Design Innovation thanks to the Wanderers collection, designed with Christoph Bader and Dominik Kolb and inspired by ideas of interplanetary exploration. The most influential of the Wanderers was the Living Mushtari chestpiece, a model digestive tract filled with liquid and a colony of photosynthetic bacteria and E. Coli. Producing Mushtari required new modelling methods for printing long flexible tubes with varying thickness.

Also in 2015, a Mediated Matter team developed G3DP, the first 3D printer for optically transparent glass. At the time, sintering 3D printers could print with glass powder, but the results were brittle and opaque: G3DP successfully managed to emulate traditional glass working processes.

Vases made by such "molden glass sewing machine" went on exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt and other museums, and a 10-foot tall sculpture of light and printed glass, YET, was designed for the 2017 Milan Design Week.

Oxma’s latest projects include Rottlace, a set of 3D-printed feathered, filamented, and textured masks made for Icelandic artist Björk after a 3D scan of her face.

Well, that was barely a taste of Neri Oxman’s talent, Brad Pitt’s quite rumoured new affair. If any of this is true, it means that the American actor (the one of Seven, Fight Cub and Allied) is looking for far more than physical beauty. After all, how can you blame him? And now, the big question, would she be happy with his success and stunning appearance, or would she rather know more about his journalism studies at the University of Missouri, where he surrendered to few examinations from the degree to follow the dream to break down in Hollywood?