Programmable Structures Lab

Purdue University School of Mechanical Engineering


Dr. Andres Arrieta

ME 3061H, HLAB 2030
aarrieta@purdue.edu

Dr. Andres F. Arrieta leads the Programmable Structures Laboratory. He was named the Doug and Cathy Field Rising Star Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering in 2025. He joined Purdue University in August 2015 as an Assistant Professor of the Mechanical Engineering School and in May 2017 as an Assistant Professor (by courtesy) in the Aeronautics and Astronautics School. Prior to joining Purdue, he held the Compliant Systems Group Team Leader position of the Composite Materials and Adaptive Structures Laboratory (CMAS) at ETH Zurich, Switzerland for 3 ½ years. While in Zurich, received the prestigious ETH Postdoctoral Fellowship from ETH Zurich in 2012, enabling him to conduct his research independently. Before this, he was a Marie Curie Early Training Fellow and Research Associate at the Dynamics and Oscillations Group of the Technical University Darmstadt in Germany between 2010 and 2012. He received his Mechanical Engineering degree in 2006 from Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia; Ph.D. in 2010 from the Mechanical Engineering Department of the University of Bristol, United Kingdom.

Prof. Arrieta’s research focuses on investigating the interrelation between shape-property-function of material systems and structures with a focus on exploiting nonlinearity to generating multifunctional systems. His work lies at the interface between structures and vibrations uncovering and applying nonlinear phenomena, such as buckling and multi-stability, to engineering applications. These ideas are applied to programmable structures, light-weight morphing structures, time-varying metamaterials and energy harvesting systems.

Dr. Arrieta has graduated 8 Ph.D. and 12 M.S. students and is currently advising 7 Ph.D. and 3 M.S. students. He has published 68 journal papers and 72 international peer-reviewed conference papers.

Selected Honors and Awards

  • 2024, AIAA American Society Composites Student Paper Award (for doctoral students Karthik Boddapati and Juan Osorio) for the paper "On the loss of stability of bistable laminates due to clamping."
  • 2023, ASME Best Paper Award in Bioinspired Materials and Systems and also ASME SMASIS Division-Level Best Paper Award in Mechanics and Material Systems for the paper titled "Neuromorphic metamaterials for mechanosensing and perceptual associative learning" in Advanced Intelligent Materials, 2200158, 2022 (co-authors: K. S. Riley, S. Koner, J. C. Osorio, Y. Yu, H. Morgan, J. P. Udani, S. A. Sarles).
  • 2023, Best student paper award (for doctoral student Katie Riley) at the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Flexible and Printable Sensors and Systems (FLEPS) for the paper "Flexible mechanical sensors with time-dependent, viscoelastic responses".
  • 2022, Emerging Leader Award in Smart Materials and Structures for the article: Topological wave energy harvesting in bistable lattices.
  • 2020, CAREER award for early-career faculty from the National Science Foundation for project titled "The Mechanics of Hierarchically Multistable Metastructures."
  • 2018, ASME Gary Anderson Early Achievement Award for “notable contributions [and] impact on the fields of Adaptive Structures and Material Systems.”
  • 2017, Journal Cover for paper Tailorable Stiffness Chiral Metastructure, Physica Status Solidi (RRL), 147:274-285, 2017.
  • 2017, ASME Best Paper in Dynamics & Control in Adaptive Structures entitled: “Novel chiral structure with tailored mechanical response exploiting elastic instabilities".
  • 2016, Top 5 most cited papers since 2014 in Progress in Aerospace Science for paper entitled: Variable stiffness material and structural concepts for morphing applications. 
  • 2014, Best student paper (for doctoral student Izabela Kuder). ASME Conference on Smart Structures, Adaptive Structures and Intelligent Systems (SMASIS2014), Newport, RI, USA, September 8-10, 2014.

Selected Media Coverage

Dr. Arrieta's work has attracted international media coverage in several scientific and general public outlets: