Markus J. Buehler
Markus J. Buehler | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1977 |
| Nationality | American |
| Citizenship | American |
| Alma mater | University of Stuttgart (BS) Michigan Technological University (MS) Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems & University of Stuttgart (PhD) |
| Known for | Artificial Intelligence for science and engineering, computational materials science of biological materials, including: structural proteins such as collagen, silks and amyloids, intermediate filaments and synthetic peptide materials; nanoscience and nanotechnology (carbon and derived nanomaterials); sonification and musical composition; sci-art |
| Awards | Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award, National Science Foundation CAREER Award, National Academy of Engineering-Frontiers in Engineering, Thomas J.R. Hughes Young Investigator Award (ASME), Rossiter W. Raymond Memorial Award (AIME), Sia Nemat-Nasser Award, Leonardo da Vinci Award, Stephen Brunauer Award, Alfred Noble Prize, TMS Hardy Award, MRS Outstanding Young Investigator Award, Foresight Institute Feynman Prize (Theory), Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher, ASME Drucker Medal, Elected Member, National Academy of Engineering (NAE), Washington Award |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Materials Science, Artificial Intelligence, Engineering Science, Mechanical Engineering, Biomechanics, Solid Mechanics, Biology, Nanoscience, Nanotechnology, Physics, Materiomics, Sonification, Composition, Sonification, Classical Music, |
| Institutions | California Institute of Technology, Max Planck Institute for Metals Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Doctoral advisor | Huajian Gao |
| Doctoral students | Sinan Keten, Zhiping Xu, Dipanjan Sen, Anna Tarakanova, Jingjie Yeo |
| Website | http://lamm.mit.edu/ |
Markus J. Buehler is an American materials scientist and engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he holds the endowed McAfee Professorship of Engineering chair. He is a member of the faculty at MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, where he directs the Laboratory for Atomistic and Molecular Mechanics (LAMM),. He is a member of MIT's Center for Computational Science and Engineering (CCSE) in the Schwarzman College of Computing. He is a pioneer in AI for science and engineering. He created powerful graph‑aware, multi‑agent AI models that turn heterogeneous data into science-grounded actionable insight, powering breakthroughs in materials science, biology and healthcare. His work on AI-driven knowledge discovery and graph reasoning demonstrated the utilization of machine intelligence to further scientific breakthroughs with applications in nanotechnology, advanced materials, and protein science.
His scholarship spans science to art, and he is also a composer of experimental, classical and electronic music, with an interest in sonification. He has given several TED talks about his work.
Between 2013 and 2020, he served as the head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT. His research and teaching activities center on the application of a computational materials science approach to understand functional material properties in biological and synthetic materials, specifically focused on mechanical properties and nano-engineering of multiscale materials.
His work incorporates materials science, engineering, mathematics and the establishment of links between natural materials with the arts through the use of category theory.
Working at the interface of art and science, he is also a composer of music with an interest in sonification, whereby he developed a method to translate material structure into musical form and vice versa, realizing a materialization of sonic information in biomaterials protein design. He developed the materiomusical compositional technique.
In 2020, he set the pathogen of COVID-19 to music, exemplifying a relationship between art and science.