Arvind Murugan

• Year

  2025

• Program

  Schmidt Science Polymaths

• Institution

  University of Chicago

• Field of Study

  Physics

• Location

  USA

Dr. Arvind Murugan is an Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago. He earned a undergraduate degree in mathematics from Caltech and a PhD in string theory from Princeton, with postdocs at Institute for Advanced Studies and Rockefeller (systems biology), and Harvard (soft matter).

Murugan’s group seeks to distill the hallmarks of life—learning, self‑replication, and evolution—into the simplest systems that straddle the line between animate and inanimate matter. His group pioneered a “physical learning” framework demonstrating that everything from mechanical lattices to molecular soups can acquire new behaviors by simply experiencing examples of those behaviors, in a manner reminiscent of neural networks. By viewing collective phenomena in physical systems, such as phase transitions and mechanical bifurcations, through a new lens, this framework uncovers expressive, trainable computation latent in the dynamics of matter itself. In this way, the Murugan group seeks to push the concepts of computation and learning beyond neuro-inspired architectures.