Jeremy L. England

Biography

Jeremy England joined the MIT Physics Department as an Assistant Professor in September 2011. Born in Boston, Jeremy grew up in a small college town near the New Hampshire seacoast. After earning a bachelor's degree in biochemistry from Harvard in 2003, he began his graduate studies at the University of Oxford, and subsequently completed his doctorate in physics at Stanford in 2009. Before coming to MIT, he spent two years as a lecturer and research fellow at Princeton University.

Research Interest

Professor England's research is directed towards understanding the physical bases of complex life-like behaviors. While not unique to living things, phenomena such as self-replication, predictive computation, and energy-seeking strongly evoke the characteristics of life because they arise so frequently in the biological realm, and so rarely elsewhere. Once viewed in physical terms, each of these phenomena poses a range of questions about the statistical thermodynamics of many-particle systems driven far from equilibrium. England Group aims to tackle these questions using techniques of analytical derivation and numerical simulation. By combining proofs of general thermodynamic constraints on the nonequilibrium regime with empirical investigations of the phenomenology of complex, interacting assemblies of matter in simulation, England and co-workers seek to define the physical conditions under which strikingly life-like behaviors can be expected to emerge spontaneously. The overall objective is to chart a course of inquiry that traces the boundary between inanimate and living matter