Markus J. Buehler

Markus J. Buehler (born 1977) is an engineer and materials scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is the Jerry McAfee (1940) Professor of Engineering, with appointments in civil and environmental engineering, mechanical engineering, the Schwarzman College of Computing, and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES). He directs the Laboratory for Atomistic and Molecular Mechanics. His research combines materials science, computational mechanics, and artificial intelligence to investigate the relationships between molecular structure, the organization of materials at different scales, and mechanical behavior.

His work has included the mechanics of silk, collagen, and bone; the design of bioinspired composites; and AI methods for materials discovery and protein design. He is also a composer of classical and experimental music and has investigated sonification as a way to represent molecular structures and spider webs through music. Buehler served as head of MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering from 2013 to 2020. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2023.