2022 Early Career Award for Biological Physics
Dr. Armita Nourmohammad
University of Washington and Max Planck Institute
Citation:
“For the creative development of theoretical and data-driven approaches to the dynamics and evolution of the adaptive immune system, grounded in non-equilibrium statistical physics and information theory.”
Background:
Armita Nourmohammad is an Assistant professor in Physics at the University of Washington, Seattle, and a Max Planck Research Group Leader and the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-organization, Göttingen. Nourmohammad works at the interface of statistical physics and biology and develops theoretical and data-driven models to study evolutionary processes across scales. Nourmohammad’s recent focus is on understating how the adaptive immune system is organized in light of host-pathogen coevolution and leveraging this understanding to predict and control immune responses to evolving pathogens. Nourmohammad grew up in Tehran, Iran, where she received her B.S. degree in Physics from Sharif University in 2006. She then moved to Cologne, Germany to obtain her Ph.D. in 2012, with a thesis on statistical physics and population genetics. She continued her postdoctoral research as a James S. McDonnell fellow at Princeton University, where she started working on immunological problems from a biophysical and an evolutionary perspective. In 2017 Nourmohammad joined the Max Planck Society and the University of Washington and has been actively involved in research and teaching at both of these institutions. Nourmohammad is a recipient of an NSF CAREER award and an NIH MIRA award.