RADLab

Reconfigurable and Adaptive Designs Lab · Department of Engineering Science · University of Oxford

fig.1 — a bistable arch. click it.

01 / Research

We design structures whose nonlinearity does the work. Buckling, snapping, jamming and entanglement give ordinary matter the ability to sense, move and decide without electronics. We build machines that think with their bodies, and materials that behave like machines.

  • mechanical metamaterialsbehaviour from geometry, not chemistry: multistability, programmable stiffness, shape change by design.
  • inflatable structuresflat membranes that morph into cylinders, cones, and hinges. Kinking and snap-through as pneumatic actuation.
  • soft roboticsmachines that compute with their bodies, from grippers to deployable devices.
  • granular matterentanglement and jamming as a route to grasping and reconfigurable structure.

02 / People

Always happy to hear from prospective DPhil students and postdocs — write to us.

03 / Recent papers

  • Vacuum–Laser Fabrication of Programmable Soft Actuators Rezanejad, Mousa, Wang, Adlerstein, Yao & Forte · Advanced Science · 2026 · doi · cover ↗
  • Hybrid Jamming–Magnetic Reconfigurable Soft Structures for Shape Morphing Robotics Yao, Wang, Rezanejad & Forte · IEEE RoboSoft · 2026
  • Multifunctional Fluidic Units for Emergent, Responsive Robotic Behaviors Mousa, Comoretto, Overvelde & Forte · Advanced Materials · 2025 · doi · cover ↗
  • Programmable Entanglement of Granular Mechanical Metamaterials Rezanejad, Mousa, Lorenz, Howard & Forte · Advanced Functional Materials · 2025 · doi · cover ↗
  • Programmable Surface Dimpling of Textile Metamaterials for Aerodynamic Control Farrell, McCann, Forte, Walsh & Bertoldi · Advanced Materials · 2025 · doi · cover ↗

Full list on google scholar.

06 / Contact

Department of Engineering Science
University of Oxford, Parks Road
Oxford OX1 3PJ, UK