Research vision

Matter is the loom that weaves shape into agency.

Three pillars - geometry, mechanics, and fabrication - drawn as a wheel that turns tangled threads into an ordered weave — Disordered threads become an ordered weave through the lab's three pillars - geometry, mechanics, and fabrication.

Geometry processing

We build the computational methods that work backwards from function to form: inverse design, conformal mapping, discrete differential geometry, and the topological analysis of networks and textiles. Given a surface to deploy into, a stiffness map to match, or a response to encode, these tools return a shape that can actually be made - a flat pattern that snaps into a dome, a loop architecture that yields a prescribed compliance. Geometry is our raw material: it weighs nothing, ships as mathematics, and never runs out.

Dissipative and multistable mechanics

We study the nonlinear phenomena that give structure its agency without motors or electronics: elastic instability and multistability, frictional contact, entanglement, and vibration. Each is a capability hiding in plain sight - a snap-through is an actuator, a frictional interface is a memory, an entangled network is toughness that chemistry alone cannot buy, a vibrating film is a manufacturing tool. Our aim is to understand these phenomena deeply enough to compose them: materials that hold state, switch on cue, and respond to their environment through mechanics alone.

Matter-writing fabrication

We treat fabrication as part of the research, not the step after it. Multimaterial 3D printing, machine knitting and engineered textiles, wafer-scale processing, and robotic deposition each let designed mechanism become physical at a different scale - from microns to metres - and in different places, from the cleanroom to structures too large or too remote to bring to a factory. New fabrication routes are how the lab's ideas escape the lab.

Woven together

The three come together in everything we build: a mechanical bit is geometry, bistability, and printing; a deployable circuit is an inverse-designed pattern, geometric frustration, and wafer fabrication; a tough tissue-like material is loop topology, entanglement, and a knitting machine. We teach matter to behave - and we train people who can carry all three toolboxes at once.