Katia Bertoldi from Harvard University holds Max Planck Lecture 2026

Stuttgart – Katia Bertoldi, Professor of Applied Mechanics at Harvard University in the US was the prominent speaker at this year’s Max Planck Lecture hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. In her talk entitled “Toward Intelligent Metamaterial Machines”, Bertoldi highlighted flexible mechanical metamaterials. These are engineered structures whose unique geometries allow the materials to display remarkable behaviors, especially in the nonlinear regime. These systems hold promise for enabling the next generation of smart materials and devices, offering capabilities such as shape morphing, programmable nonlinear responses, and energy manipulation.

By embedding programmable mechanics, shape-shifting functions, and computational abilities directly into a single monolithic structure, Bertoldi and her team open the door to a new class of machines that require minimal electronic input and derive their advanced functionality from their intrinsic architecture. In her talk, Bertoldi highlighted the recent progress toward integrating shape morphing, sensing, and intelligence within a single synthetic material system to realize such machines.

Katia Bertoldi is the William and Ami Kuan Danoff Professor of Applied Mechanics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She earned master degrees from Trento University (Italy) in 2002 and from Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden) in 2003, majoring in Structural Engineering Mechanics. Upon earning a Ph.D. degree in Mechanics of Materials and Structures from Trento University, in 2006, Katia joined as a PostDoc the group of Mary Boyce at MIT. In 2008 she moved to the University of Twente (the Netherlands) where she was an Assistant Professor in the faculty of Engineering Technology. In January 2010 Katia joined the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University and established a group studying the mechanics of materials and structures. She is the recipient of the NSF Career Award 2011 and of the ASME's 2014 Hughes Young Investigator Award. She published over 150 peer-reviewed papers and several patents.

Bertoldi’s research contributes to the design of materials with a carefully designed meso-structure that leads to novel effective behavior at the macroscale. She investigates both mechanical and acoustic properties of such structured materials, with a particular focus on harnessing instabilities and strong geometric non-linearities to generate new modes of functionality. Since the properties of the designed architected materials are primarily governed by the geometry of the structure (as opposed to constitutive ingredients at the material level), the principles she discovers are universal and can be applied to systems over a wide range of length scales.