Moumita Das

Moumita Das is a Professor of Physics at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where she leads a research group at the interface of soft matter physics and biology. Her group uses theory and computation to understand how living materials — from the cartilage in our joints to the scaffolds of our cells — get their remarkable mechanical properties, and how the same principles can inspire a new generation of smart, resilient materials.

She earned her PhD from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard, UCLA, and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam before joining RIT in 2012. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and her work has been recognized with a Cottrell Scholar Award, a Scialog Fellowship, and RIT’s Norman A. Miles Award for Academic Excellence in Teaching. Her research is supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Beyond research, she is active in science policy and in efforts to make physics a more welcoming field, and she co-organizes an international virtual seminar series in biological physics.