Mittwoch 16:00 Uhr - 17:15 Uhr Online via Zoom

livMatS Colloquium | Prof. Pedro Reis (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne) | A Virtual lab tour of the Flexible Structures Laboratory at EPFL

Abstract
It used to be that academic seminars involved traveling to a host institution to deliver a talk and meet with colleagues (do you remember those days?!). Times have changed, at least temporarily, but this situation is also opening opportunities. We invite you for a virtual tour of our Flexible Structures Laboratory at EPFL in Switzerland. We will show you our experimental facilities and share some of our recent research activities. Multiple members of our team will be involved in this tour. Research at our group focuses on the general area of the mechanics of slender structures, which leverage their post-buckling regime for novel modes of functionality. Recently, we have become fascinated with active structures made out of magneto-rheological elastomers that can be actuated in the presence of external magnetic fields. After introducing some recent advances in experimentation, modeling, and computational for this class of systems, we will present a series of concrete examples, including: (i) (re)programmable mechanical metamaterials with programmable memory; (ii) magneto-active beams and Kirchhoff-like rods; and (iii) magnetic shells with tunable buckling properties.

Short Bio
Pedro Miguel Reis is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, where he is the Director of the Institute of Mechanical Engineering. After receiving a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Manchester (2004), he was a postdoc at the CCNY (2004-2005) and the CNRS/ESPCI in Paris (2005-2007). He joined MIT in 2007 as an Instructor in Applied Mathematics. In 2010 he moved to MIT’s School of Engineering, with dual faculty appointments in Mechanical Engineering and Civil & Environmental Engineering. Prof. Reis moved to EPFL in 2017. In October 2013, the Popular Science magazine named Prof. Reis to its 2013 “Brilliant 10” list of young stars in Science and Technology. He has also received the 2014 CAREER Award (NSF), the 2016 Thomas J.R. Hughes Young Investigator Award (ASME), the 2016 GSOFT Early Career Award for Soft Matter Research (APS), he is a Fellow of the APS, and he is the 2021 President of the Society of Engineering Science (SES).

Registration link for Zoom tour