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 in MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Department of Mechanical Engineering, where he directs the Laboratory for Atomistic and Molecular Mechanics (LAMM). 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. In 2020, he set the pathogen of COVID-19 to music, exemplifying a relationship between art and science.
Education and career Before joining MIT in 2005, he served as the director of multiscale modeling and software integration at Caltech's Materials and Process Simulation Center in the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. He received a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Stuttgart and the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research after obtaining an M.S. in Engineering Mechanics from Michigan Tech, and undergraduate studies in Chemical and Process Engineering at the University of Stuttgart.
Research Buehler has a background in materials science, engineering science, applied mechanics and computational science. Buehler's research focuses on bottom-up simulation of structural and mechanical properties of biological, bioinspired and synthetic materials across multiple scales, with a specific focus on materials failure from a nanoscale and molecular perspective, and on developing a fundamental understanding of how functional material properties are created in natural, biological and synthetic materials, including agentic AI and graph-based reasoning models. He is best known for the use of simple computational models to explain complex materials phenomena in biology and engineering from a bottom-up perspective. His work on 3D printing explores the integrated computational-experimental design of novel materials, including the use of AI and AR/VR, and immersive modeling. He has used a computational materials science approach to study materials failure in biological systems, including the investigation of material breakdown in a variety of diseases and other extreme conditions across multiple time- and length-scales. He has used the universality-diversity paradigm to explain how multifunctionality (diversity) of material properties in biology is achieved by changing structural arrangements of few (universal) constituents rather than inventing new building blocks, or through reliance of the quality of building blocks. His work has involved the use of ologs, a category-theoretic framework for knowledge representation, to encode the structure-function relationships inherent in hierarchical materials. Buehler has published more than 500 articles, with more than 55,000 citations, on theoretical and computational modeling of materials using various types of simulation methods, a monograph on atomistic modeling, a book on Biomateriomics, several book chapters, and has given hundreds of invited lectures, keynote talks and plenary speeches around the world. His work is published in peer-reviewed scientific journals such as Nature, Nature Materials, PNAS, Science Advances, Advanced Materials, Royal Society Interface, and many others. In a Stanford University study, he was named as one of the world's highly ranked researchers in 2020, within the top 0.09% of all researchers in the nanoscience category.
Teaching His teaching at MIT focus on engineering mechanics and modeling and simulation, and on introducing undergraduate and graduate students to computational research. He teaches professional educational courses in areas of materials design, machine learning, and additive manufacturing. He is the author of the textbooks Atomistic Modeling of Materials Failure and Biomateriomics.
Service
Buehler serves as editor or a member of the editorial board of several international journals including APL Machine Learning, PLoS ONE, International Journal of Applied Mechanics, Biophysical Journal, Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials, Journal of Engineering Mechanics, Journal of Nanomechanics and Micromechanics, and the Journal of Computational and Theoretical Nanoscience. Since 2011 he serves as a co-Editor in Chief of BioNanoScience. He was elected to the editorial board of the Journal of the Royal Society Interface in 2012. He is the former chair of the Biomechanics Committee at the Engineering Mechanics Institute of the ASCE, co-chair of the NanoEngineering in Medicine and Biology Steering Committee at the ASME, a member of the U.S. National Committee on Biomechanics, and participates in several other committees at ASME, including the Committee on Mechanics in Biology and Medicine. He is also active in the Materials Research Society as volunteer writer for the MRS Bulletin, organizer of MRS symposiums, and through his involvement in the MRS Graduate Student Award program. Since 2010 he serves as the director of the MIT-Germany Program (MISTI Germany). He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials.
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