Robert Austin is professor of physics at Princeton University and is head of the Robert H. Austin Research Group in Biophysics. He received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana in 1976 and was a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry from 1976 to 1979. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His research includes fundamental studies of protein folding, cancer physics, bacterial communication, bacterial-phage evolution, and robotic swarms. He has served as the biological physics editor for Physical Review Letters, serves on numerous review panels for NIH, NSF, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and NIST. He won the 2005 Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society and the 2014 Max Delbruck Prize of the American Physical Society.