Jen Schwarz is a professor of physics at Syracuse University, New York, and a fellow of the APS. Her theoretical physics research group studies percolation transitions, rigidity transitions, and shape instabilities in living and nonliving matter ranging from such systems as granular packings to fiber networks to brain organoids. In collaboration with Silke Henkes, David Quint, and Yaouen Fily, she introduced frictional rigidity percolation, a new class of rigidity percolation for frictional granular packings in 2016. Since then, the researchers have continued to develop the theory along with experimentalist Karen Daniels and others.
