Benjamin Machta, PhD

Ben Machta is an Associate Professor of Physics and member of the Systems Biology Institute at Yale University. Ben received an undergraduate degree in Physics from Brown University and a PhD from Cornell University where he used information geometry to study the emergence of simple models, and began a long-standing interest in membrane criticality. He completed a postdoc at Princeton as a Lewis-Sigler Theory fellow before moving to Yale in 2018.

Ben’s research focuses on understanding how biological systems operate using approaches from theoretical physics. His group uses statistical physics to understand the structure and function of biological membranes, which experiments have shown operate close to a demixing critical point in the Ising universality class. They also use tools from information theory to place physical bounds on the ability of organisms to function that arise from their limited ability to measure their environment and from their limited energy budget.