M Cristina Marchetti

Biography

M. Cristina Marchetti was educated in Italy at the University of Pavia and earned her Ph.D. in the U.S. at the University of Florida. She has been a member of the Physics faculty at UCSB since 2018, after thirty years on the faculty at Syracuse University, where she served as Department Chair and as Associate Director of the Syracuse Biomaterials Institute.
Marchetti is a theoretical physicist who has worked on a broad range of problems in condensed matter and biological physics, including supercooled fluids, superconductors, driven disordered systems and the mechanics of biological tissue. Currently, she is interested in understanding the emergent behavior of active matter. She has served as co-Lead Editor of Physical Review X for the period 2016-2021 and is currently co-lead editor of the Annual Reviews of Condensed Matter Physics. Since 2005, she has served on the Leadership Board of the Boulder School for Condensed Matter and Materials Physics. Marchetti is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the US National Academy of Sciences. She is the recipient of the 2019 Leo P. Kadanoff prize of the American Physical Society.

Research

My research group is interested in the emergent behavior of active and living matter. Active systems are assemblies of interacting entities that individually consume energy to generate motion and forces and collectively exhibit organized behaviors on scales much larger than that of the individuals. The active matter paradigm is relevant to phenomena on many scales, from the control of human crowds to the collective migration of epithelial cells in wound healing. We employ theory and computation and make complementary use of bottom-up modeling and top-down phenomenology to investigate the self-organized structural and mechanical properties of these complex systems.