Meet the team

Principal Investigator

Martin Horák

Assistant Professor at the Department of Mechanics, Faculty of Civil Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague, and Research Scientist at the Institute of Information Theory and Automation of the Czech Academy of Sciences. His research focuses on computational modeling of soft active materials and structures, mechanics of generalized continua, and the development of scientific simulation tools.

He is involved in the development of the open-source finite element solver OOFEM, and has contributed to the MuPIF multiphysics integration platform. He leads the SOFFA ERC CZ project on soft surfaces, constitutive models, instabilities, and numerics.

Marco Amato

Marco is a postdoctoral researcher at the Czech Technical University in Prague. His research is situated in solid and structural mechanics, with emphasis on nonlinear phenomena, configurational forces, and magnetoelasticity.

His work combines analytical modeling with numerical simulations to study material response, instabilities, contact, and multiphysics loading in soft and structural systems.

Ondřej Faltus

Ondřej focuses on computational mechanics of highly deformable structures, contact, and architected materials. His work includes third-medium finite element contact formulations, pneumatic actuation of internal voids, and robust numerical models for contact-dominated problems.

He also works on pattern-forming pneumatic metamaterials, where pressure-induced instabilities can be used to actively control the effective stiffness and deformation patterns of the material.

Riccardo Voso

Riccardo contributes to the group activities in computational mechanics of soft materials. A more detailed biography can be added here once the public profile text is available.

Michal Šmejkal

Michal works on the computational mechanics of soft solids with surface energy. His research contributes to nonlinear-elasticity models with surface energy, surface-polyconvex constitutive modeling, finite element implementation, and benchmark problems where surface mechanics plays a dominant role.

He also contributes to the formulation of incremental equations for curvature-dependent surface elasticity and to the stability analysis of surface-driven phenomena in soft cylindrical substrates.