Markus J. Buehler, associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has been named the 2012 Materials Research Society Outstanding Young Investigator. Buehler was cited for “highly innovative and creative work in computational modeling of biological, bio-inspired and synthetic materials, revealing how weakness is turned into strength through hierarchical material design.” He will deliver an award talk at the 2012 Materials Research Society Spring Meeting in San Francisco.
Buehler has made profound contributions by bridging disciplines to explain the mechanical properties of structural biological materials in both normal physiological and disease states using an innovative bottom-up approach that combines simulation with experiment.
Through research rooted in atomistic-level multiscale models of materials, Buehler has identified the core principles that link the fundamental atomistic-scale chemical structures to functional, engineering scales by understanding how biological materials achieve superior mechanical properties through the formation of hierarchical structures by merging structure and material concepts. He has demonstrated that the way components are connected at distinct scales defines what functional materials properties can be achieved, how they can be altered to meet functional requirements, and how they fail in disease states and under extreme conditions.
Moreover, Buehler’s work is extradisciplinary. For example, he discovered through an application of category theory that a striking similarity exists between the structure and function of protein materials, music, language, and social networks, by identifying universal principles of generating heightened functionality despite intrinsic limitations of building blocks. He uses computational methods to shed light on key questions that cannot be addressed through experiments due to lack of resolution, condition control, or other limitations.
By focusing on the link between the atomistic, the meso-, and the macroscale, his work has furthered the understanding of the mechanisms of injury and disease by probing how structural changes (e.g., genetic mutations and other molecular defects) alter materials properties, and by providing a materials science foundation to disease mechanisms (e.g., brittle bone disease). His approach enables the investigation of different biological and synthetic materials with the same technique and without reliance on empirical efforts.
Buehler received his Dr. rer. nat. (PhD equivalent) degree in 2004 from the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, and joined MIT in 2005 after a postdoctoral scholarship at the California Institute of Technology. Since 2010, he has been serving as director of the MIT-Germany Program and as group leader of the Mechanics and Materials Division in Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT. Since 2011, he has been serving as co-director of the MIT Computation for Design and Optimization Program. In 2004, Buehler received the MRS Graduate Student Gold Award. In 2011, he received numerous honors, including the Thomas J.R. Hughes Young Investigator Award, the Alfred Noble Prize, and the Leonardo Da Vinci Award. Buehler serves as editor or on the editorial board of numerous publications. He serves MRS in a number of capacities, including judge and chair of the MRS Graduate Student Award subcommittee, as a volunteer writer for MRS Bulletin, and as a lead organizer of several symposia at MRS Meetings.
