MAE Colloquium: Katia Bertoldi (Harvard)

Bio: Katia Bertoldi is the William and Ami Kuan Danoff Professor of Applied Mechanics at Harvard University. Bertoldi earned master's degrees from the University of Trento in 2002 and from Chalmers University of Technology in 2003, majoring in structural engineering mechanics. Upon earning a Ph.D. degree in mechanics of materials and structures from University of Trento, in 2006, she joined the group of Mary Boyce at MIT as a postdoc. In 2008 Bertoldi became an assistant professor in engineering technology at University of Twente. In 2010 Bertoldi joined the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University, where she established the Bertoldi group focused on the study of the mechanics of materials and structures.

Bertoldi’s research contributes to the design of materials with a carefully designed meso-structure that leads to novel effective behavior at the macroscale. Bertoldi 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 materials are primarily governed by the geometry of the structure (as opposed to constitutive ingredients at the material level), the principles Bertoldi discovers are universal and can be applied to systems over a wide range of length scales.