The nature of life is one of the most widely examined topics in science and yet remains deeply mysterious.
Life is governed by physical laws, shaped by chemical interactions and influenced by environmental conditions. Leveraging physical principles helps scientists better understand living systems. But the reverse is also true: Scientists can apply biological principles to better understand or design physical systems.
Arvind Murugan, associate professor in the University of Chicago Department of Physics, the James Franck Institute and the College, works at the intersection of several fields. He uses biology, physics, computation and materials science to study the essential functions of life—learning, self-replication and evolution—in the simplest possible systems.
“My group studies how physical systems can learn and process information by exploiting their innate abilities rather than through top-down engineered solutions,” said Murugan, who joined UChicago in 2015.
Recently named one of eight 2025 Schmidt Polymaths, Murugan joins a global cohort of creative, recently tenured scientists and engineers working in a variety of disciplines who will each receive up to $2.5 million over five years to pursue research in new disciplines or using new methodologies.
Schmidt Sciences is a nonprofit organization founded in 2024 by Eric and Wendy Schmidt that works to accelerate scientific knowledge and breakthroughs with the most promising, advanced tools to support a thriving planet. The Schmidt Science Polymath Program enables researchers to take adventurous leaps, engaging in novel research that would otherwise be challenging to fund.
Murugan will use his award to “explore how molecules can learn and compute by doing what comes naturally, revealing how evolution and synthetic biology can harness hidden powers in the physics of matter without micromanaging every detail.”
‘Neuroscience without neurons’
When scientists work with cells, they often treat them like tiny computers. Sensing, decision-making and action are all separate. That “separate brain and muscle” concept, inspired by how engineers build computers, guides how scientists explain cell behavior and informs synthetic biology designs.
“My group asks, what if the muscle can also do the learning and the thinking?” said Murugan. “What if the same physical and chemical processes that produce a response can also sense what’s happening and choose the right response?”
He calls this “neuroscience without neurons.”
Compared with separate-brain-and-muscle designs, the systems Murugan’s team studies use fewer engineered parts and require less energy while building a collective that is more reliable than its parts. The team sees it as a promising alternative for understanding what cells actually do and as a new kind of engineering for molecular systems made of unreliable parts.
One specific project involves neural network–like computation through the physics of phase transitions. Over the years, Murugan’s team has shown that physical systems can use phase boundaries—the same concept that separates ice from liquid water—to make complex decisions based on multiple input factors, much like those made by simple neural networks.
These boundaries can act like physical versions of the if/then switches that form the basis of computing: Cross the phase boundary and proteins condense, or stay on the other side and they don’t.
These physical systems can even learn to make new kinds of decisions by just experiencing examples of desired behaviors.
“All of this might remind you of artificial intelligence—or neural networks—on a computer,” said Murugan, “except here, all the learning and computation happen in the physical world, through what molecules naturally do.”
Another area of interest for Murugan’s lab is error correction through the physics of matter. Error correction costs time, but their work shows that it doesn’t have to—in fact it can save time, when accounting for the natural physics of systems.
In many molecular processes, mistakes jam the line, so to preserve speed, there are built-in checks that prevent jams. An example is the ability of DNA polymerase to “proofread” and correct errors in copied strands of DNA. Those checks reduce errors, making the system faster and more accurate. The team’s results suggest that developing complex error-correction machinery seen in cells may be easier than expected.
“Error correction doesn’t always come at a cost,” said Murugan. “You can sometimes have a free lunch of both speed and accuracy.”
An artisanal approach
One way to be multidisciplinary is through large interdisciplinary collaborations, said Murugan. Yet when it comes to his group, the aim is to become interdisciplinary individuals, not just specialists filling one role on an interdisciplinary team.
For example, physicists in Murugan’s group are learning and carrying out experiments that require deep knowledge of RNA biochemistry and yeast biology, while an experimental chemist in the group is learning to take a statistical physics approach to evolution on the computer. Other physicists are studying foundational questions in computer science and adapting those concepts to molecular behavior.
“Our goal is for each person to carry the whole problem—experiment, theory, and modeling—in their head,” said Murugan. “It’s not the most scalable approach, but it surfaces ideas that siloed workflows tend to miss.”
He calls it an "artisanal" approach to science.
The Schmidt Polymath Award is meaningful because it validates this non-scalable concept, he said. The money will give students and postdocs the freedom to pursue bold theory and experiments in molecular evolution and information processing that conventional funding might not reward because researchers aren’t “sticking to their lanes.”
UChicago’s multidisciplinary legacy
“UChicago’s culture is entirely responsible for my developing the style and signature now recognized by Schmidt Sciences,” said Murugan. “Within one block of 57th Street, people in my group can walk from physics to chemistry to ecology to cell biology and have the conversations that spark inspired work.”
Murugan’s group benefits from the highly collaborative and interdisciplinary Center for Living Systems. This National Science Foundation Physics Frontier Center, led by Prof. Margaret Gardel, was established in 2023 with faculty from 10 different UChicago departments as well as collaborators from Northwestern University and Marine Biological Laboratory.
This multidisciplinary culture also allowed Murugan to ignore the pressure to fit a mold for career advancement.
“Junior faculty get no shortage of advice on how to pick problems based on what’s becoming popular or is currently seen as impactful. I’m deeply grateful that, during my junior years at Chicago, mentors here and elsewhere strongly discouraged that mindset,” he said.
He highlights colleagues Gardel, Sidney Nagel, and Jack Szostak at UChicago, Erik Winfree at Caltech and Terry Hwa at the University of California San Diego for being especially forceful in urging him to follow and trust his own judgment.
“The temptation to inject one’s own scientific taste into advice must be strong, and I’m glad they refrained,” he said.
He also recognizes the people who came to work with him with the same adventurous attitude: former postdoctoral researcher Kabir Husain, current postdocs Riccardo Ravasio and Martin Falk, and former graduate students Vedant Sachdeva and Menachem Stern.
“I’m also very excited about the current cohort,” said Murugan. “They are pushing in even bolder and newer directions.”
This article was originally published on the Physical Sciences Division website.
