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The adaptive and surprising emergent properties of biological materials self-assembled in far-from-equilibrium environments serve as an inspiration for efforts to design nanomaterials and their properties. In particular, controlling the…
Cells and microorganisms employ dynamic shape changes to enable steering and avoidance for efficient spatial exploration and collective organization. In contrast, active colloids, their synthetic counterparts, currently lack similar…
Ordered mechanical systems typically have one or only a few stable rest configurations, and hence are not considered useful for encoding memory. Multistable and history-dependent responses usually emerge from quenched disorder, for example…
Combinatorial mechanical metamaterials are made of anisotropic, flexible blocks, such that multiple metamaterials may be constructed using a single block type, and the system's response depends on the frustration (or its absence) due to the…
Elastic structures can be designed to exhibit precise, complex, and exotic functions. While recent work has focused on the quasistatic limit governed by force balance, the mechanics at a finite driving rate are governed by Newton's…
Modeling folding surfaces with nonzero thickness is of practical interest for mechanical engineering. There are many existing approaches that account for material thickness in folding applications. We propose a new systematic and broadly…
Spinodal metamaterials, with architectures inspired by natural phase-separation processes, have presented a significant alternative to periodic and symmetric morphologies when designing mechanical metamaterials with extreme performance.…
Engineering synthetic materials that mimic the remarkable complexity of living organisms is a fundamental challenge in science and technology. We study the spatiotemporal patterns that emerge when an active nematicfilm of microtubules and…
Flexible mechanical structures can undergo large deformations under small loads, enabling large, complex, and nonlinear wave responses under finite-frequency driving. Here, we study a dynamically driven canonical flexible mechanical…
Physical learning is an emerging paradigm in science and engineering whereby (meta)materials acquire desired macroscopic behaviors by exposure to examples. So far, it has been applied to static properties such as elastic moduli and…
We propose a general multiscale approach for the mechanical behavior of three-dimensional networks of macromolecules undergoing strain-induced unfolding. Starting from a (statistically based) energetic analysis of the macromolecule…
The bistability of embedded elements provides a natural route through which to introduce reprogrammability to elastic meta-materials. One example of this is the soft morphable sheet, in which bistable elements that can be snapped up or…
Mechanical metamaterials are artificial composites with tunable advanced mechanical properties. Particularly interesting types of mechanical metamaterials are flexible metamaterials, which harness internal rotations and instabilities to…
Shape-morphing metamaterials enable adaptive structures capable of complex functional deformations, with applications ranging from reconfigurable structures and soft robotics to medical devices. However, their design remains challenging due…
We use coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations to study the motility of a 2D vesicle containing self-propelled rods, as a function of the vesicle bending rigidity and the number density, length, and activity of the enclosed rods.…
The structure and degree of order in soft matter and other materials is intimately connected to the nature of the interactions between the particles. One important research goal is to find suitable control mechanisms, to enhance or suppress…
A collection of thin structures buckle, bend, and bump into each-other when confined. This contact can lead to the formation of patterns: hair will self-organize in curls; DNA strands will layer into cell nuclei; paper, when crumpled, will…
Dynamic shape-morphing soft materials systems are ubiquitous in living organisms; they are also of rapidly increasing relevance to emerging technologies in soft machines, flexible electronics, and smart medicines. Soft matter equipped with…
The inverse problem of designing component interactions to target emergent structure is fundamental to numerous applications in biotechnology, materials science, and statistical physics. Equally important is the inverse problem of designing…
We create mechanical metamaterials whose response to uniaxial compression can be programmed by lateral confinement, allowing monotonic, non-monotonic and hysteretic behavior. These functionalities arise from a broken rotational symmetry…