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About

Orit Peleg is a pioneering biophysicist whose research bridges the physics of collective behavior across the animal and plant kingdoms. Her work explores how organisms—from fire ants and honeybees to blackworms and sunflowers—use physical principles to self-organize, communicate, and adapt. Peleg is best known for her studies on fire ant tower-building, where she revealed how ants assemble their bodies into dynamic, multifunctional structures that combine sensing, computation, and actuation—a phenomenon with implications for robotics and materials science. Her research on honeybee trophallaxis uses data-driven models to uncover how liquid food exchange efficiently distributes nutrients across a colony. In plant behavior, Peleg demonstrated that noisy circumnutations in sunflowers facilitate self-organized shade avoidance, revealing a previously unknown role for these exploratory movements. With over 20 citations across her most-cited works, her impact is growing rapidly. Her 2024 review, *The Physics of Animal Behavior*, synthesizes her interdisciplinary approach, spanning scales from individual movement to collective construction. Peleg’s work has been recognized for its originality, earning her a place among the leading voices in active matter and organismal biophysics.