Prize Recipient

Corentin Coulais
University of Amsterdam

"For pioneering research into soft matter-based metamaterials with on-demand mechanical properties."

Corentin Coulais received his BSc and MSc from École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (FR) in 2009, and earned his PhD at CEA Saclay and University Pierre and Marie (FR) in 2012 for work on the fluctuations and mechanical response of granular media at the Jamming transition. Corentin was a postdoctoral fellow at Leiden University and AMOLF (NL), investigating flexible mechanical metamaterials. In 2016, he received a NWO VENI grant before moving top the University of Amsterdam, where he has been a faculty at the Institute of Physics since 2017. Since then he has received the ERC Starting and Proof-of-concept grants, the NWO VIDI grant and multiple grants in collaboration with industry. Corentin combines additive manufacturing, precision-desktop experiments, numerical methods and theory inspired from condensed matter to create soft materials that blur the boundary between material and machine. His best-known works include combinatorial metamaterials that exhibit advanced shape morphing and non-reciprocal active metamaterials that exhibit non-Hermitian wave phenomena.