Jochen Mueller is an assistant professor with a primary appointment in the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering and secondary appointments in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering. His work unites additive manufacturing, functional materials, and computational design to advance fabrication capabilities and create architected materials and multifunctional structures with properties difficult or impossible to achieve by conventional means. He is a faculty member of the Center for Additive Manufacturing and Architected Materials (JAM2), a Fellow of the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute (HEMI), an associate researcher with the Institute for NanoBioTechnology (INBT), and an affiliated faculty member of the Translational Therapeutics & Regenerative Engineering Center (TTREC).

Mueller’s hands-on experience in the aerospace, automotive, and food industries informs his research and teaching, ensuring they address real-world needs and translate to practical impact. He advises industry and has served as an expert witness in intellectual property matters. He also co-founded Offbeast (formerly Mooji Meats), an alternative-protein company that scaled a 3D printing process to efficiently produce plant-based—and, in the future, cell-based—meats that closely mimic the authentic fibrous texture of real meat; the company is supported by Y Combinator and has been featured multiple times in TechCrunch.

Mueller received the Johns Hopkins University Catalyst Award for developing a new metal additive manufacturing process and the Whiting School of Engineering Research Lab Excellence Award for innovative research. In 2020, he received the Lopez-Loreta Prize to investigate how to improve materials used in prosthetic devices. He is an inventor on more than ten provisional and granted patents, and his research has been published in journals such as Advanced Materials, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), and Nature, as well as media outlets including The Boston Globe, MIT Technology Review, and The Times.

He holds a doctorate from ETH Zurich, a master’s in Advanced Mechanical Engineering from Imperial College London, and a bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering from Albstadt-Sigmaringen University. Before joining Johns Hopkins University, Mueller completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. He received the ETH Medal in 2018 for his doctoral dissertation. He is a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the Association of German Engineers (VDI), and the Materials Research Society (MRS).