L. Mahadevan Receives Inaugural Suzanne Eaton Award

L. Mahadevan, the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and of Physics if the recipient of the 2026 Suzanne Eaton Physics of Life Award. His work has helped define physics of life by showing how a small set of theoretical principles closely linked with experiments determine the shapes and motions of multicellular tissues, organs, organisms and their collectives. From gastrulation to gut looping and brain folding, from stem to leaf and flower morphology, his contributions to the field have shown the importance of growth and activity driven instabilities for the emergence of complex functional shapes. Separately, he has illustrated how plants exploit instabilities to turn slow biological processes into fast, robust motion, how rapid muscle contraction rates are ultimately limited by slow water movements, and how the brain, body and environment work together to coordinate the dynamics of locomotion in such instances as crawling worms, slithering snakes and walking and swimming fish. 

The Suzanne Eaton Awards for Physics of Life recognize outstanding scientific contributions to the physics of living systems, encompassing theoretical, experimental, and computational work at the interface of physics and biology. The award ceremony will be held at the Annual Meeting of the Physics of Life Excellence Cluster in Dresden (Germany) on November 20, 2026.