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St Hugh’s Fellow awarded Early Career Scientist Prize by the International Union for Pure and Applied Physics

Congratulations to Professor Alexander Mietke, St Hugh’s Tutorial Fellow in Physics who has been awarded the Early Career Scientist Prize by the International Union for Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP). Professor Mietke has been given this award “for groundbreaking insights that harness active matter theory to reveal how physical forces shape living form – from cellular dynamics to the emergence of body asymmetry in developing embryos.”

As part of the award, he has been invited to present his research at the International Conference on Biological Physics 2026 (ICBP2026) in June, where he will receive a medal and a monetary reward.

The IUPAP Early Career Scientist Prize recognises exceptional achievements of scientists in the field of Biological Physics at a relatively early stage of their career. The recipients must be no more than eight years past the award of their PhDs (excluding career interruptions), and they are expected to have demonstrated significant scientific achievements and display exceptional promise for future achievements in Biological Physics.

Reflecting on his award, Professor Mietke said, ‘Receiving this prize from IUPAP is a great honour and a testament to the impact that this exciting research area – the physics of life – has gained over the last years. I am looking forward to finding out how much further we can push our understanding of the physical principles that help entire organisms to emerge from just a single cell. I also want to highlight the many fantastic theoretical and experimental collaborators in physics, biology and medical science departments that I am regularly interacting with as part of my research, which is truly a great privilege.’

The full official announcement can be found here: https://iupap.org/who-we-are/internal-organization/commissions/biological-physics/c6-news/.