Orit Peleg

Orit Peleg is a broadly trained physicist with a passion for living systems. Her research is aimed at understanding how biological communication signals are generated and interpreted. While the channel may change - whether chemical, sound, or light - the living creatures of our world all encode high-dimensional biological features into low-dimensional communication patterns. I use insect swarms as a model system for identifying how organisms harness the dynamics of communication signals, perform spatiotemporal integration of these signals, and propagate those signals to neighboring organisms. Examples include fireflies who communicate over long distances using light signals, and bees who serve as signal amplifiers to propagate pheromone-based information about the queen’s location.

Peleg is an Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department and the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. She draws from a multidisciplinary background; She holds a B.S. in physics and computer science and an M.S. in physics from Bar-Ilan University in Israel. She then moved to Switzerland to get her PhD in materials science at ETH Zurich, and then to Boston for a Postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University in first chemistry, and then applied mathematics. Her honorary recognitions include the Cottrell Scholar Award, Sloan Fellow in Physics, and a National Geographic Explorer distinction.