Nikta Fakhri

Research Interests

How do living systems coordinate the actions of thousands of individual components to build organisms, adapt to changing environments, and evolve new forms and functions? My research uncovers the physical principles that govern how living systems self-organize, process information, and generate collective behaviors far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Our lab combines quantitative experiments with statistical physics, geometry, topology, and machine learning to develop quantitative and predictive frameworks for living matter. We use diverse biological systems, including developing embryos, multicellular assemblies, and active biological materials, as experimental platforms for uncovering universal principles of collective dynamics. By revealing how irreversibility, nonreciprocal interactions, and information flow shape collective biological behavior, our work unifies molecular, cellular, and organismal dynamics within a common physical framework. Our long-term vision is to establish a quantitative physics of living systems that explains how complex biological function emerges from collective interactions across scales and informs the design of adaptive materials and engineered living systems.

Biographical Sketch

Nikta Fakhri is Professor of Physics at MIT and a member of the Physics of Living and Non-equilibrium Systems. She received her undergraduate degree from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, earned her PhD from Rice University, and was a Human Frontier Science Program postdoctoral fellowship in Göttingen, Germany.

Photo credit by Steph Stevens