Markus J. Buehler is the McAfee Professor of Engineering at MIT and directs MIT's Laboratory for Atomistic and Molecular Mechanics (LAMM). He served as Head of Department, Civil and Environmental Engineering from 2013-2020. From 2018-2020 he served terms as President-elect, President and Past President of the Society of Engineering Science (SES).

Buehler’s research focuses on how protein materials define life, and how they fail catastrophically due to disease. His work has shown how biological materials achieve extraordinary properties through multiscale hierarchy, rather than through the diversity of the underlying building blocks, and has designed lighter, stronger and durable materials.

Working at the interface of art and science, he is a composer of experimental music with an interest in sonification, and developed a method to translate material structure into musical form and vice versa, realizing a materialization of sonic information in biomaterials protein design. He is well-known for the development of the materiomusical compositional technique.

His scholarly work includes more than 450 peer-reviewed journal articles in journals like Nature, Nature Materials, Science Advances, PNAS, Advanced Materials, and others, with about 30,000 citations. Buehler has delivered hundreds of plenary and keynote speeches around the world.

Buehler received the NSF CAREER award, the United States Air Force Young Investigator Award, the Navy Young Investigator Award, and the DARPA Young Faculty Award, as well as the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. In 2010 he received MIT's Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award for exceptional distinction in teaching and in research or scholarship. Other awards include the TMS Hardy Award, the IEEE Holm Conference Mort Antler Lecture Award, the MRS Outstanding Young Investigator Award, the SES Young Investigator Medal, the T.J.R. Hughes Young Investigator Award, the Nemat-Nasser Medal, the R.W. Raymond Memorial Award, the Brunauer Award, the Alfred Noble Prize, and the Leonardo da Vinci Award. He was selected as a 2018 Highly Cited Researcher for producing multiple highly cited papers ranking in the top 1% for a publication field. In 2019, he received the Materials Horizons Outstanding Paper Prize by the Royal Society of Chemistry, and was named as one of the top 0.09% of researchers worldwide in nanoscience in 2020’s World Ranking of Scientists by Stanford University.

Buehler serves as a member of the editorial board of many international publications and has chaired many committees.