M. Cristina Marchetti

M. Cristina Marchetti is a Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California Santa Barbara. She was educated in Italy at the University of Pavia, earned her Ph.D. in the U.S. at the University of Florida, and joined the faculty at UC Santa Barbara in 2018, after thirty years on the faculty at Syracuse University. Marchetti is a theoretical physicist who has worked on a broad range of problems in condensed matter physics, including supercooled fluids, superconductors and driven disordered systems. Currently, she is interested in understanding the emergent behavior of active matter. The name refers to large collections of self-driven agents that exhibit organized behaviors on scales much larger than that of the individuals. Examples range from the flocking of birds to the sorting and organization of cells in morphogenesis, and include synthetic analogues, such as active colloids and engineered microswimmers. Marchetti is currently co-lead editor of the Annual Reviews of Condensed Matter Physics. She 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. In 2019 she was awarded the inaugural Leo P. Kadanoff prize by the American Physical Society.