Markus J. Buehler is an American materials scientist and engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he holds the endowed McAfee Professorship of Engineering chair. He is a member of the faculty at MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, where he directs the Laboratory for Atomistic and Molecular Mechanics (LAMM), and also a member of MIT's Center for Computational Science and Engineering (CCSE) in the Schwarzman College of Computing. His scholarship spans science to art, and he is also a composer of experimental, classical and electronic music, with an interest in sonification. He has given several TED talks about his work. Between 2013 and 2020, he served as the Head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT. His research and teaching activities center on the application of a computational materials science approach to understand functional material properties in biological and synthetic materials, specifically focused on mechanical properties and nano-engineering of multiscale materials. His work incorporates materials science, engineering, mathematics and the establishment of links between natural materials with the arts through the use of category theory. Working at the interface of art and science, he is also a composer of music with an interest in sonification, whereby he developed a method to translate material structure into musical form and vice versa, realizing a materialization of sonic information in biomaterials protein design. He developed the materiomusical compositional technique. In 2020, he set the pathogen of COVID-19 to music, exemplifying a relationship between art and science. Education and career Before joining MIT in 2005, he served as the Director of Multiscale Modeling and Software Integration at Caltech’s Materials and Process Simulation Center in the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. He received a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Stuttgart and the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research after obtaining an M.S. in Engineering Mechanics from Michigan Tech, and undergraduate studies in Chemical and Process Engineering at the University of Stuttgart. Research Buehler has a background in materials science, engineering science and applied mechanics. Buehler's research focuses on bottom-up simulation of structural and mechanical properties of biological, bioinspired and synthetic materials across multiple scales, with a specific focus on materials failure from a nanoscale and molecular perspective, and on developing a fundamental understanding of how functional material properties are created in natural, biological and synthetic materials. He is best known for the use of simple