Dr. Deliz-Aguirre won first place in the Public Choice Award from the 2025 Helmholtz Imaging scientific image competition, His image, entitled Starfish Puts Motion Back in the Ocean, shows starfish embryos generating tiny currents that push them together to form crystal-like arrangements. Their microscopic tentacles create currents that mirror Earth’s magnetic shield visually and mathematically, and led to equations that might also apply to black hole plasmas and herds.

Deliz-Aguirre is a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science, where he works with Professor Uri Alon. His research uses interdisciplinary approaches to advance translational medicine. His goal is to improve disease diagnosis and therapies. Deliz-Aguirre uses complex systems physics to mathematically model patient samples analyzed with spatial proteomics.