Ezra Ben-Abu

Lavine Family Fellow

Israeli University: Technion

Columbia Affiliation: Department of Mechanical Engineering

Faculty Host: Prof. Hod Lipson

Research Topic: From sand to castle: Fully automated robotic construction from local materials

Ezra Ben-Abu is a PhD candidate in Mechanical Engineering at the Technion and an Azrieli Fellow. His research focuses on multistable structures, architected materials, soft robotics, deployable structures, and metafluids. During his doctoral studies, he developed a novel method for programming and fabricating multistable structures by harnessing mechanical instabilities and nonlinear deformations in thin cylindrical shells. As a Kalaniyot Fellow at Columbia University, his postdoctoral research will explore autonomous construction of adaptive structures and scalable fabrication strategies for next-generation reconfigurable architectures.