Prize Talk: Early Career Award for Soft Matter Research

Absorbing shocks and vibrations and mitigating fracture is a formidable challenge in an increasing number of applications. In this talk, I will present how mechanical materials can be used to mitigate vibrations, shocks and fracture in extremely lightweight metamaterials and could be used in the context of automotive and aerospace applications. To this end, I will first show how one can navigate the geometrical design space using a combination of geometrical, combinatorial, and AI techniques to design metamaterials with on-demand static responses. Second I will illustrate how one can leverage the dissipative and nonlinear nature of the constitutive material itself to create metamaterials at full scale with target dynamical responses.