Jörn Dunkel

Bio

Jörn Dunkel joined the mathematics faculty as Assistant Professor in 2013. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2018, received tenure in 2020, and was promoted to Full Professor in 2022. In 2023 he was appointed MathWorks Professor of Mathematics, succeeding Gil Strang.

Jörn's current research focuses on studying self-organization processes in complex biological and physical systems, from bacterial biofilms and embryonic tissues to brain dynamics and global trade networks. To this end, his group is developing and investigating mathematical models that describe and predict the dynamical behavior of non-equilibrium systems.

Jörn holds Diplomas in Physics (2004) and Mathematics (2005) from the Humboldt University Berlin. He completed his PhD in Statistical Physics under Peter Hänggi at the Universität Augsburg in 2008. After two years of postdoctoral research at the Rudolf-Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics in the University of Oxford, he spent three years as a Research Associate at DAMTP in the University of Cambridge.

Jörn was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship in Physics at Mansfield College, University of Oxford in 2008, and was named Research Fellow at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge in 2011. He is the recipient of the 2011 Gustav Hertz Prize of the German Physical Society. In 2015 Jörn was awarded an Alfred P Sloan Research Fellowship, and recognized with an Edmund F Kelly Research Award from the MIT Mathematics Department. He received a Complex Systems Scholar Award from the James S McDonnell Foundation in 2016. From 2020 until 2023, Jörn was the Robert E Collins Distinguished Scholar in the MIT Mathematics Department. He received a Schmidt Science Polymath award in 2023.