L. Mahadevan

L. Mahadevan, Ph.D.
Founding Core Faculty Member

Maha is interested in the spatial and temporal dynamics of how matter is organized, i.e., how it is shaped and how it flows. His group uses a combination of techniques to explore this issue, ranging from simple observations of phenomena to quantitative experiments and theory. Working in several enabling technology platforms at the Wyss Institute, he has also been pursuing the inverse problem of how the shape and flow of matter may be controlled in space and time. He is contributing his expertise in applied math to several projects involving bio-inspired robotics including an experimental study of individual locomotion in a toy model and a study that measures leg function during locomotion to guide the design and control of active prosthetics. In the area of Adaptive Material Technologies, he is using computational tools to understand the exotic geometry of pleated and creased structures found in nature, such as insect wings and plant leaves.

At Harvard, Maha is the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and an Affiliate Professor in Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. He is also a Schlumberger Visiting Professor at the Mathematics Institute at the University of Oxford, UK, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the National Center for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India. Before arriving at Harvard in 2003, Maha was the first Schlumberger Professor of Complex Physical Systems in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University, and a Fellow of Trinity College. Among his many awards are a 2009 MacArthur "genius" grant, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, MIT's Edgerton award, Harvard's George Ledlie Prize, and named lectures and Professorships at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris.

http://www.seas.harvard.edu/softmat/