Orit Peleg

In 2018, Peleg joined the faculty of the University of Colorado Boulder in the Computer Science Department and the BioFrontiers Institute. In 2019 she was appointed to the Santa Fe Institute. Her research considers how living organisms generate and interpret signals for the purpose of communication.

Peleg completed her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Physics and Computer Science at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel in 2007. She received her PhD in 2012 from ETH Zurich, where she studied competitive interactions in biological systems. Her doctoral research considered the physics of biological nanopores. Peleg then moved to Harvard University, where she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and then the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. There she worked on the evolution of protein interactions and the morphology of honeybee swarms.

Orit Peleg (born 1983) is an Israeli computer scientist, biophysicist and Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department and the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder in Boulder, CO. She is also an External Professor of the Santa Fe Institute. She is known for her work on collective behavior of insects and the biophysics of soft living systems, including honeybees and fireflies. Applications of her work range from human communication, smart-material design, and swarm robotics. She has won national and international awards and prizes, including a Cottrell Scholars Award in 2022 and being named a National Geographic Explorer in 2021.