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Nikta Fakhri head shot

Nikta Fakhri

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Recipient of the Soft Matter Award

For groundbreaking and inspiring developments in probing and analyzing biological systems as emergent non-equilibrium systems, elucidating how molecular-scale processes form cooperative functional structures at cellular and organismal scales.

About the Recipient

Invited talk session: B20.00001

Nikta Fakhri is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at MIT. She completed her undergraduate degree at Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran (2002) and her PhD at Rice University (2011). She was a Human Frontier Science Program postdoctoral fellow at Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, Germany before joining MIT Department of Physics in 2015 as an Assistant Professor. Nikta Fakhri is the recipient of 2017 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Physics, 2018 IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Biological Physics and the 2019 NSF CAREER Award. Her group focuses on discovering underlying principles of collective dynamics and complex spatiotemporal patterns in far from equilibrium living systems. They develop experimental tools and conceptual frameworks to uncover laws governing order, phase transitions and fluctuations in systems in which individual components break time reversal symmetry.

About the Early Career Award for Soft Matter Research

The award was established in 2015 and was generously sponsored by Solvay through 2020.