Professor Michael Cates holds the prestigious Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, a position historically occupied by scientific luminaries including Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking, which he has held since 2015. Born on May 5, 1961, he completed both his undergraduate studies in Natural Sciences and his PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied under Sam Edwards and earned his doctorate in 1985. Following postdoctoral positions at Exxon Corporation and the University of California at Santa Barbara, he returned to Cambridge as a research fellow and lecturer at the Cavendish Laboratory before establishing himself as a leading theoretical physicist. In 1995, he moved to the University of Edinburgh as Professor of Natural Philosophy, a position he held for twenty years while serving as Principal Investigator for an EPSRC Programme Grant on soft materials, before returning to Cambridge to assume the Lucasian Professorship.
Professor Cates is renowned for his groundbreaking contributions to the statistical mechanics of soft condensed matter, with over 400 refereed scientific publications accumulating more than 50,000 citations and an impressive h-index of 118. His research has focused on the relationship between constituent objects in complex systems—such as polymers, colloidal particles, and surfactant molecules—and their emergent flow properties, fundamentally advancing our understanding of non-Newtonian fluids. A notable achievement came in 2014 when he devised a theory explaining why dense corn-starch solutions solidify under rapid stirring, solving a long-standing puzzle with significant implications for industrial applications and materials science. His more recent work has expanded into the statistical physics of active matter, where he has made seminal contributions to understanding systems of self-propelling particles that require constant energy input, such as bacterial swarms and synthetic active colloids.
As a leader in his field, Professor Cates has received numerous prestigious honors including election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2007 and as an International Member of both the US National Academy of Sciences and the US National Academy of Engineering. He heads the Soft Matter research group within the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge, where he continues to investigate the theoretical foundations of complex fluids and active matter systems that challenge traditional paradigms of statistical physics. His current research explores the statistical mechanics of particles that continuously convert energy into motion, opening new frontiers in non-equilibrium physics with potential applications across biology and materials science. Professor Cates also contributes significantly to education, teaching an advanced course in the Part III Mathematics Tripos on the theoretical physics of soft condensed matter, thereby training the next generation of theoretical physicists who will advance our understanding of these complex systems.
