Prize Recipient

Nikta Fakhri
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"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."

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.

Kari Dalnoki-Veress, McMaster, Emanuela Del Gado, Department of Physics, Georgetown U Nigel Goldenfeld, Department of Physics, University of Illinois Eleni Katifori, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania Cecilia Leal, Materials Science & Engineering, University of Illinois Robin Selinger, Materials Science, Kent State U