Soft mechanics is an emerging field devoted to understanding matter and systems that exhibit both fluid-like and solid-like behavior. In these systems, mechanical instabilities and nonlinearities are not merely failures to avoid, but generative mechanisms that create structure, drive transport, and organize matter across scales. From the wrinkling of thin shells and interfacial fingering in viscous flows to the supercoiling of DNA and the morphogenesis of leaves and flower petals, instabilities give rise to ordered patterns from initially uniform states.

This program will address a central scientific question: can the broad range of instability-driven phenomena observed in fluids, solids, and living matter be understood within a unified theoretical and experimental framework? More broadly, can such instabilities be harnessed to create new functionalities, morphologies, and paradigms of mechanical computation? By bringing together researchers from soft condensed matter physics, mechanics, applied mathematics, non-equilibrium statistical physics, and engineering, the program aims to foster new conceptual and experimental approaches for understanding geometry, instability, and nonlinear dynamics in complex systems.