Orit Peleg

Peleg is an Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department and the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder and an External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. She is leading an interdisciplinary lab aimed at understanding how biological communication signals are generated and interpreted, using insect swarms as a model system. 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.

Her honorary recognitions include the Cottrell Scholar Award, Sloan Fellow in Physics, and a National Geographic Explorer distinction. Peleg 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 Ph.D. in materials science at ETH Zurich, and then to Boston for a Postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University in first chemistry, and then applied mathematics.