Principal Investigator: Igor Bargatin The Bargatin Group develops advanced nanofabrication methods to create mechanical metamaterials and energy devices. Their innovations include plate metamaterials, nanocardboard, and microfabricated thermionic converters for direct heat-to-electricity conversion. They also investigate novel levitation and propulsion techniques for microflyers and lightsails, uniting mechanical, electrical, materials, and applied physics.
Principal Investigator: Rachel Holladay The AMP Lab focuses on enabling robots to robustly perform long-horizon, contact-rich manipulation tasks in everyday environments, such as cooking dinner in the home or cleaning up messy classrooms. Drawing on tools from planning, control, mechanics and learning, we develop algorithms, frameworks and models to tackle the dual challenges of long-horizon decision-making and acting under uncertainty.
Principal Investigator: Samantha A. McBride The McBride Lab integrates interfacial science, fluid physics, and soft matter to engineer solutions in water, energy, and sustainability. Through microfluidics and nano/microscale devices, they study transport and phase change phenomena, informing materials design for desalination, resource recovery, waste remediation, and energy–water nexus challenges.
Principal Investigator: George I. Park The Park Lab is a Computational Fluids Group that develops predictive, cost-effective computational frameworks for multi-physics fluid dynamics, addressing high-Reynolds-number turbulence, compressibility, heat transfer, complex geometries, and fluid–structure interaction. By simulating real-world scale problems, they uncover fundamental mechanisms of momentum and heat transfer from first principles to inform engineering design.
Principal Investigator: Paris Perdikaris The Predictive Intelligence Lab develops foundation models and physics-informed machine learning to transform physical simulation across scientific domains. By integrating physics-informed neural networks, neural operators, and generative models, we create AI systems that respect fundamental physical principles while learning from diverse datasets. Our research also advances uncertainty quantification and sequential decision making to enable reliable predictions in data-scarce environments. Taken together, we bridge traditional scientific computing with modern machine learning to accelerate discovery and innovation — from climate and atmospheric modeling to materials engineering, fluid dynamics, and biomedical applications.
Principal Investigator: Michael Posa The DAIR Lab studies control, learning, planning, and analysis for robots interacting with complex and ever-changing environments. They develop data-efficient algorithms that blend modern AI and optimization with non-smooth contact dynamics to enable dynamic and safe dexterous manipulation and legged locomotion.
Principal Investigator: Jordan R. Raney The Architected Materials Laboratory investigates how innovation in materials design can expand control of mechanical properties. Their research includes fundamental studies of geometric control of nonlinear dynamic properties, 3D-printable composites, and stimuli-responsive mechanical logic, enabling novel functionalities in areas ranging from robotics to fluid-structure interaction.
Principal Investigator: Celia Reina The Non-Equilibrium Mechanics Laboratory develops cutting-edge theoretical and computational frameworks to understand, predict, and design materials operating far from equilibrium. Their research addresses complex phenomena—including plasticity, phase transformations, viscoelasticity, and diffusion-driven processes—by working at the intersection of continuum mechanics, statistical physics, machine learning, and applied mathematics.
Principal Investigator: Cynthia Sung The Sung Robotics Lab investigates co-design of robot bodies and control, understanding how intelligence can be embedded and distributed throughout a robot’s physical body to enhance its adaptability, efficiency, and performance. They combine computational methods with practical engineering design to produce novel platforms for legged and underwater locomotion, manipulation, and health.
Principal Investigator: Ottman A. Tertuliano The Tertuliano Lab investigates interactions between tissue mechanics and microstructure to drive new therapies and resilient synthetic materials. Combining nano- and microscale experimental mechanics with additive manufacturing, they engineer biocompatible systems that guide cellular behavior and adaptable materials for applications from regenerative healthcare to innovative engineered systems.
Principal Investigator: Nat Trask The Physics-Informed Machine Intelligence Lab integrates physics and mathematics into ML architectures by embedding geometric mechanics, exterior calculus, variational methods, and probabilistic principles into neural networks. Its models deliver interpretability and rigor for physical regimes, powering scientific inference, digital twins, and autonomous experimentation across energy, climate, fusion, and soft matter.
Principal Investigator: Nat Trask The Physics-Informed Machine Intelligence Lab integrates physics and mathematics into ML architectures by embedding geometric mechanics, exterior calculus, variational methods, and probabilistic principles into neural networks. Its models deliver interpretability and rigor for physical regimes, powering scientific inference, digital twins, and autonomous experimentation across energy, climate, fusion, and soft matter.
Principal Investigator: Kevin T. Turner The Turner Research Group investigates problems at the nexus of mechanics, materials, and manufacturing. The group works to advance the performance of manufacturing processes, materials, and devices by exploiting an understanding of the underlying mechanics and materials science. Current projects include surfaces with switchable adhesion, fracture of architected materials, electroadhesives for robots, and biodegradable cellulose-based sensors.
Principal Investigator: Shujie Yang The Yang Lab combines acoustics, microfluidics, and biomechanics to create micro/nano technologies for engineering and medical applications. They apply physics and mechanics to engineer innovative biomedical devices and address challenges in diagnostics, therapeutics, and healthcare research.
