Markus Buehler

Markus J. Buehler is the McAfee Professor of Engineering and Head of the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He directs the Laboratory for Atomistic and Molecular Mechanics (LAMM), leads the MIT-Germany program, and is Principal Investigator on numerous national and international research programs. Buehler’s primary research interest is to identify and apply innovative approaches to design better materials from less, using a combination of high-performance computing, new manufacturing techniques, and advanced experimental testing. He combines bio-inspired materials design with high-throughput approaches to create materials with architectural features from the nano- to the macro-scale, and applies them to various domains that include composites for vehicles, coatings for energy technologies, and innovative and sustainable construction materials.

Buehler is a sought-after lecturer and has given hundreds of invited, keynote, and plenary talks throughout the world. His scholarly work is highly-cited and includes more than 350 articles on computational materials science, biomaterials, and nanotechnology, many in high-impact journals such as Nature, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He authored two monographs in the areas of computational materials science and bio-inspired materials design, and is a founder of the emerging research area of materiomics. He is a dedicated educator and a gifted teacher, and has appeared on numerous TV and radio shows to explain the impact of his research to broad audiences. In 2016 Prof. Buehler was awarded the Foresight Institute Feynman Prize for his advances in nanotechnology

Research Interests

Materials science and mechanics of natural and biological protein materials (materiomics), how protein materials define our body and how they fail catastrophically (fracture, deformation, disease), large-scale atomistic modeling, protein based materials and biopolymers, interaction of chemistry and mechanics, bridging chemical scales to continuum theories of materials, modeling of bio-nano-materials phenomena, multiple-scale simulation, development and use of multi-scale simulation tools.