MERLN Speaker Series | Corentin Coulais
We are honoured to welcome Corentin Coulais for the MERLN Speaker Serieson the 10th of March.
Corentin Coulais is an associate professor working at the boundary between physics and engineering on the field of mechanical metamaterials. He holds a MSc and a PhD in physics. He has 12 years of experience with mechanical metamaterials from manufacturing, modelling, and optimization. He is the principal investigator of multiple project, including an ERC Consolidator Grant and an NWO Vidi grant, and guides a group of 5 PhD students and 4 postdocs. Research highlights include shape-changing (Nature 2016), non-reciprocal (Nature 2017), edible (Soft Matter 2022), topological (Nature 2023, PNAS 2024), self-folding (Nature 2018) and multifunctional (PNAS 2021, Nat. Comm. 2024) metamaterials as well as metamaterials energized from within (Nat. Comm. 2019, PNAS 2020, Nature 2024, Nature 2025). In addition, he recently started to explore how material nonlinearities could be used to design metamaterials with superior dissipative performances (Adv. Mater. 2023, Nature 2025) and hence be applied in the high-tech sector. In addition, he was awarded the NWO VENI in 2015, the ERC Starting Grant in 2019 and has won the 2024 Early Career Award for soft matter research of the American Physical Society.