Markus J. Buehler is an American materials scientist and engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is the McAfee Professor of Engineering. He is a member of the faculty at MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, where he directs the Laboratory for Atomistic and Molecular Mechanics (LAMM), and also a member of MIT's Center for Computational Science and Engineering (CCSE) in the Schwarzman College of Computing. Between 2013-2020, 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. 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 experimental 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 is well-known for the development of the materiomusical compositional technique. In 2020, he set the pathogen of COVID-19 to music, exemplifying a relationship between art and science.

Soft Robotics with Markus Buehler

Marwa ElDiwiny, host of the Soft Robotics podcast, interviews Markus about his work in soft robotics.