Markus J. Buehler

Markus J. Buehler is a German-American materials scientist working in the area of computational multi-scale modeling of deformation and fracture of materials. He currently holds the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Career Development Professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

After undergraduate education at the University of Stuttgart, Germany in Chemical and Process Engineering, Markus Buehler received his M.S. degree in Engineering Mechanics from Michigan Technological University in 2001. From 2001 to 2004 he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research in Stuttgart under the supervision of Professor Huajian Gao, Germany as a research assistant from where he also received his Ph.D. in Chemistry.

From 2004 to 2005, he held an appointment as the Director of Multiscale Modeling and Software Integration and Postdoctoral Scholar at the Materials and Process Simulation Center at the California Institute of Technology in Professor William A. Goddard’s group. There he oversaw multi-scale method development and applications in modeling of small-scale materials phenomena.

In 2005, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for an appointment as a Postdoctoral Associate. He assumed a faculty appointment in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in 2006. Prof. Buehler founded MIT’s Laboratory for Atomistic and Molecular Mechanics, where his research is focused on multi-scale modeling and simulation of complex hierarchical protein materials. His current research interest is focused on collagenous tissues, bone, spider silk, amyloids, as well as the mechanics of the cell’s cytoskeleton. Overall his main interests are in the elucidation of materials science paradigms for protein materials, with particular focus on fracture and deformation, which falls into an area of study referred to as materiomics. His goal is the advancement of the understanding of large hierarchical assemblies of protein structures and protein materials in biology. Prof. Buehler also works on the transfer of knowledge of materials science from biology to technological applications in the design of biomimetic materials and nanotechnology. A particular focus of his research program at MIT is the application of fracture mechanics concepts to understand the behavior and structural concepts of proteins and protein materials. He has demonstrated these approaches in several classes of protein materials, such as alpha-helices, beta-sheets and tropocollagen molecules. He has also developed the universality-diversity-paradigm (UDP) applied to protein materials, which provides a new analysis platform to describe the behavior of proteins and other biopolymers in the context of a broader range of properties, including the biological role, materials properties, process-structure integration and the possibility to enrich current engineering paradigms of generating structures at the nanoscale.