Prof. Yair Shokef

Yair Shokef completed his B.Sc. in Mathematics and Physics at the Hebrew University, M.Sc. in Physics at Ben Gurion University, and Ph.D. in Physics at the Technion. During the years 2006-2008 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Pennsylvania, and during the years 2008-2011 at the Departments of Physics of Complex Systems and of Materials and Interfaces at the Weizmann Institute of Science. In 2011 he joined the senior academic staff of the School of Mechanical Engineering in Tel Aviv University. Currently he is a Full Professor at the School of Mechanical Engineering and at the School of Physics and Astronomy. Since 2022 he has been chairing the Center for Physics and Chemistry of Living Systems. During the years he had extended scientific visits at multiple leading institutes worldwide, including: University of Cambridge (UK), École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris (France), Brandeis University (USA), Los Alamos National Laboratory (USA), University of California Santa Barbara (USA), Leiden University (Netherlands), AMOLF (Netherlands), University of Amsterdam (Netherlands) and Hiroshima University (Japan).

The research that Prop. Shokef leads employs theoretical and computational tools to understand the physics of soft matter systems. In such natural as well as designed structures, we often understand pretty well how individual units behave, but the system as a whole exhibits non-trivial emergent phenomena. Prof. Shokef's current research focuses on memory and computing in smart materials, mechanics of living systems, and mechanical metamaterials. More details at the group's website.

Complete list of publications:  Google Scholar

Selected Publications:

Geometric frustration in buckled colloidal monolayers - Nature 456, 898 (2008)

Order-by-disorder in the antiferromagnetic Ising model on an elastic triangular lattice - PNAS 108, 11804 (2011)

Combinatorial design of textured mechanical metamaterials - Nature 535, 529 (2016)

Topological defects produce exotic mechanics in complex metamaterials - Nature Physics 16, 307 (2020) 

Bloch oscillations, Landau–Zener transition, and topological phase evolution in an array of coupled pendula - PNAS 121, e2310715121 (2024)

Emergent disorder and mechanical memory in periodic metamaterials - Nature Communications 15, 4008 (2024)