2025 Recipient

Ben Machta is an assistant professor of physics and member of the QBIO institute at Yale University. His research aims to quantify the physical constraints that limit biological processes, and to understand how biological systems use phase transitions, critical points and dynamical bifurcations for function. His group uses a combination of theory and simulation, making frequent use of tools from information theory and statistical physics. Ben received an undergraduate degree in Physics from Brown University and a Physics PhD from Cornell University, supervised by James Sethna. He was then a Lewis-Sigler Theory fellow at Princeton before moving to Yale University to start his faculty position in 2018. Ben is a recipient of a Simons Investigator award and an NIH MIRA award.