Aparna Baskaran has received the 2019 Early Career Award for Soft Matter Research by the American Physical Society “for pathbreaking advances in our understanding of the physics of soft materials out of equilibrium, especially active and granular matter.”

Baskaran is an associate professor in the Martin A. Fisher School of Physics at Brandeis University, where she has been on the faculty since 2010.

Her research centers on understanding theoretical principles that underlie nonequilibrium phenomena in soft materials and physical biology.

Her research also involves close collaboration with experimentalists and computer simulators to understand and model particular systems, from which she extracts theoretical ideas that transcend the context of their origin and apply to broad classes of nonequilibrium systems, according to a press release.

She received her undergraduate degree from Pondicherry University in 2001 and her doctorate from the University of Florida in 2006.

The early career award recognizes outstanding and sustained contributions by a young researcher to the field of soft matter during his or her initial period of full-time employment.

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