MechE Colloquium with Carlos Portela: Toward new architected-material frontiers: unconventional designs and extreme conditions

Date: Friday, November 13, 2026 Location: 3-270 Time: 3:30pm-4:30pm ET Speaker: Carlos Portela Affiliation: Associate Professor, MIT Mechanical Engineering Host: Professor Xuanhe Zhao Talk title: Toward new architected-material frontiers: unconventional designs and extreme conditions Abstract: Over the past two decades, many realizations of architected materials (or mechanical metamaterials) have enabled new combinations of properties that are inaccessible to conventional materials. This ability to control the effective properties of materials by primarily dictating their 3D nano- or microstructure—instead of their chemical composition—has substantially enhanced the engineering materials design space. Most contributions to date have leveraged periodic, ordered microstructures to attain these properties, but recent research efforts have highlighted the need for aperiodic and disordered microstructures to enable enhanced responses beyond the linear-elastic regime. Historically, there also remains a gap in understanding these materials’ responses under application-relevant conditions, across length and time scales. In this talk, we present recent efforts that address these challenges by proposing new design paradigms for architected materials based on networks and granular components, linking their mechanical responses to mechanisms inherent to the microstructures. Additionally, we discuss our research thrust that is enabling microscale characterization of architected materials across more than eight orders of magnitude in strain rate. Using bench top setups that achieve extreme loading conditions, we explore questions on dissipation mechanisms in metamaterials across strain rates. Altogether, these topics present new frontiers for metamaterials research that will be essential to enabling their widespread application in coming years. Bio: Carlos M. Portela is the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering at MIT. Portela received his Ph.D. and M.S. in mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, where he was given the Centennial Award for the best thesis in Mechanical and Civil Engineering. His research lies at the intersection of mechanics, nano-to-macro fabrication, and materials science with the objective of designing and testing novel materials—with features spanning from nanometers to centimeters—that yield unprecedented mechanical and multifunctional properties. Portela is the recipient of a 2026 ONR YIP award, the 2025 EML Young Investigator Award, a 2024 ARO Early Career Program Award, was recognized as an MIT TR Innovator Under 35 in 2022, and was a recipient of a 2022 NSF CAREER Award. His teaching efforts have been recognized by MIT’s 2025 Jr. Bose Award and the 2023 Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching.