HYDE PARK — Physicist Vincenzo Vitelli works on abstract, mind-bending concepts every day in Chicago. Now, he’s a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.
The 48-year-old scientist and tenured professor at the University of Chicago is one of 20 people from around the world selected to receive a “genius grant” this year. It offers “an $800,000, no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential,” according to the foundation.
Vitelli is “building theoretical frameworks to describe the behavior of matter and materials with unique properties,” according to the MacArthur Foundation. In other words, his work focuses on understanding “information-processing agents — including humans, bots, cells, and even individual molecules.”
“Our research centers on a basic question: what laws emerge when many such agents interact?” writes the Vitelli Group, a theoretical physics research group Vitelli leads at the University of Chicago.
In his grant announcement video, Vitelli said he “builds mathematical models that attempt to describe unusual systems, like swarms of robots, biological tissues, neural networks.”
Vitelli is considered a pioneer in multiple physics subfields, including metamaterials, active matter and non-reciprocal systems, according to UChicago News. For example, his lab last year demonstrated how “odd objects” can travel across terrain remarkably well, despite having “no centralized control or brain.”
“I’ve been pursuing venues that are a bit more unusual. For example, studying a collection of robots or collection of cells,” Vitelli said in his grant announcement video. “The peculiar feature of the systems I study is that they are out of equilibrium. The building blocks of which these materials are made of harvest energy from the environment. And they can translate that energy into motion or performing some functions.”
His work is often intangible and imaginative, and that’s what draws Vitelli to the field.
“My natural propensity is often to think about things that do not necessarily exist yet,” Vitelli said in his video. “In the world of metamaterial, if you come up with something that doesn’t exist but could be built, then it can be accepted and in fact just as available as modeling or describing something that exists in nature.”
Physicist Vincenzo Vitelli building mechanical metamaterials out of LEGO blocks. Credit: Provided/Vitelli Group
Vitelli, who grew up in southern Italy, lets his mind wander while living in the city — whether’s he’s commuting from his South Loop home to Hyde Park or with his wife and 5-month-old son, he told WBEZ.
Vitelli has been a professor at the University of Chicago since 2017. He’s also affiliated with the university’s James Franck Institute, the Leinweber Institute for Theoretical Physics, the Data Science Institute and the Institute for Biophysical Dynamics, according to UChicago News.
Before that, he served as a member of the faculty at Instituut-Lorentz for Theoretical Physics at Leiden University in the Netherlands from 2010-17, according to the MacArthur Foundation. Vitelli obtained a theoretical physics degree from Imperial College London in 2000 and a Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard University in 2006.
“His insights allow for deeper understanding of real-world biological and engineering systems and lay the groundwork for entirely new classes of materials,” according to the MacArthur Foundation. “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.”
Multiple University of Chicago colleagues have previously received the MacArthur fellowship, including writer Ling Ma in 2024; statistician Rina Foygel Barber in 2023; sociologist, criminologist and social worker Reuben Jonathan Miller in 2022; and film scholar, archivist and curator Jacqueline Stewart in 2021.
In 2025, the MacArthur Foundation selected South Side social justice artist Tonika Lewis Johnson for the grant.
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