Alexander Mietke

Biography

Alexander Mietke is a Tutorial Fellow of Physics at St Hugh’s College and Associate Professor of Theoretical Soft Matter and Biophysics in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford.

Alex has done his undergraduate studies at the Dresden University of Technology (TU Dresden, Diplom in Physics) and at the University of Cambridge, Trinity College (Master of Advanced Studies in Theoretical Physics). In 2018, Alex obtained his PhD in Theoretical Biophysics from the TU Dresden, working jointly at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, and at the Center for Systems Biology Dresden. After his postdoctoral research in the Department of Mathematics at MIT as a Fellow of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO), Alex became a Lecturer at the Institute of Applied Mathematics at the University of Bristol in 2022 and joined St Hugh’s College and the University of Oxford in 2023.

Research

As a theoretical physicist, Alex is working on active and living matter and frequently collaborates with experimentalists who study fundamental biological processes at the cell, tissue and organism scale with the goal to identify minimal physical principles that help guiding these processes. This often inspires new theoretical work on topics in non-equilibrium soft matter physics, where he is broadly interested in the self-organisation of mechanical and chemical patterns in active matter, the emergent shape dynamics of membranes and active surfaces, liquid crystals in complex geometries, chirality in active systems, as well as in developing coarse-graining and inference approaches that are directly applicable to experimental data.

Fellowships and Awards