Jennifer "Jen" Marie Schwarz is an American physicist whose research applies ideas from condensed matter physics including percolation theory, jamming, dislocation avalanches, and rigidity transitions to biological structures and quantum systems.
[1] Schwarz was a double major in history and physics at the University of Maryland, College Park, graduating magna cum laude in 1994.
She went to Harvard University for graduate study in physics, receiving both a master's degree and a Ph.D. in 2002.
Her dissertation, Depinning with Elastic Waves: Criticality, Hysteresis, and Even Pseudo-Hysteresis, was supervised by Daniel S.
[2] Schwarz was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2023, "for influential contributions to the statistical physics of disordered systems, particularly in the development of models concerning correlated percolation, as well as models related to rigidity transitions in both living and nonliving matter".