UChicago physicist Vincenzo Vitelli named 2026 MacArthur Fellow
Originally Published in UChicago News
Vincenzo Vitelli, a professor of physics at the University of Chicago known for his innovative work in unconventional materials, has been named a 2026 MacArthur Fellow. An affiliated scholar of the Data Science Institute, Vitelli partners with the AI+Science research initiative and mentors Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Fellows at the University of Chicago.
Given each year by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the prestigious grants recognize individuals across different fields who demonstrate “exceptional originality in and dedication to their creative pursuits.” The MacArthur recipients receive a no-strings-attached grant of $800,000.
Vitelli is a pioneer in multiple subfields of physics, including metamaterials, active matter and non-reciprocal systems.
His lab has demonstrated unique forms of motion and adaptive behavior, such as robots that use simple principles of physics to navigate complex terrain, spontaneous rotations arising from “frustration” in nonreciprocal matter, ‘hidden’ symmetries linking apparently unrelated systems, and patterns emerging from turbulent fluids. These and other discoveries could give rise to future technologies that employ these principles.
In awarding the fellowship, the committee wrote: “Vitelli’s research is inspiring new metamaterials in mechanical engineering, robotics, and biophysics, and he is opening up new research directions into how non-reciprocal physics principles could apply to biology, human behavior, and artificial intelligence.”
Visionary and minimalist endeavors
Vitelli’s work focuses on the surprising behavior that can arise when many constituents—from molecules to macroscopic objects—interact. This includes “metamaterials,” artificially created materials which can display unusual properties, and “active matter,” which is created when groups of energy-harvesting constituents act together, like fish forming a school.
“There are two features of theoretical physics that in my opinion make it a creative endeavor: it is visionary and minimalist,” Vitelli said. “Visionary because you are imagining things that do not (yet) exist; minimalist because you try to represent them using a language elegant in its parsimony—mathematics!”
Upon receiving the call notifying him of the award, “I thought it was somebody playing a prank on me,” Vitelli admitted. “It took them a while to convince me otherwise. It wasn’t until they told me to call them back at an official number that it dawned on me that this could be real!”
Vitelli said he plans to use the award to explore a research direction he’s been mulling over for a while, which he calls “agentic many-body theory.”
“What that means is a theory for the collective behavior of information processing agents such as humans, bots, cells or even molecules that individually possess the capacity for adaptive, intelligent behavior,” Vitelli said. “The question I would like to pursue is: what laws emerge when many such agents interact? The generous support of the MacArthur Foundation will provide the personal freedom and peace of mind to launch in this direction.”
“There are two features of theoretical physics that in my opinion make it a creative endeavor: it is visionary and minimalist.”
At UChicago, Vitelli is affiliated with the James Franck Institute, the Leinweber Institute for Theoretical Physics, the Data Science Institute and the Institute for Biophysical Dynamics.
He received his bachelor’s of science degree from Imperial College London and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. Before joining UChicago, he was a member of the faculty at Instituut–Lorentz for Theoretical Physics at Leiden University and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society.
Vitelli joins multiple colleagues at UChicago who have received MacArthur Fellowships, most recently including writer Ling Ma in 2024, statistician Rina Foygel Barber in 2023, sociologist Reuben Jonathan Miller in 2022 and film scholar Jacqueline Stewart in 2021.