Nikta Fakhri

Research Interests

Active processes in both living and non-living matter create a novel class of non-equilibrium materials composed of many interacting parts that individually consume energy and collectively generate motion or mechanical stresses. Active systems exhibit a wealth of intriguing properties, including anomalous fluctuations, non-equilibrium phase transitions, pattern formation on mesoscopic scales and unusual mechanical and rheological properties. In biology, active systems span a large range of length scales, from molecules to the cytoskeleton of individual cells, to tissues, whole organisms and their collective ensembles.

The Fakhri research group focuses on combining concepts from physics, biology and engineering to decode non-equilibrium mechanisms in active living matter, to exploit these mechanisms for engineering functional active materials and to identify universal behavior in this broad class of internally driven systems.

Nikta Fakhri has pioneered the use and development of fluorescent single-walled carbon nanotubes as probes in soft matter and biophysics.

Biographical Sketch

Nikta is the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Career Development Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at MIT and Physics of Living Systems Group. She completed her undergraduate degree at Sharif University of Technology and her PhD at Rice University. She was a Human Frontier Science Program postdoctoral fellow at Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, Germany before joining MIT. Nikta is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Physics. She is the recipient of the 2018 IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Biological Physics and the 2019 NSF CAREER Award.

Photo credit by Steph Stevens