Meet the team

Principal Investigator

Martin Horák

Martin leads the group. He is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Mechanics, Faculty of Civil Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague, and a 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 recently earned his PhD in Physical and Materials Engineering at the Czech Technical University in Prague, with research conducted in collaboration with Eindhoven University of Technology. He currently holds a postdoctoral position in the SOFFA ERC CZ project, where he develops computational models for coupled magnetoelasticity and third-medium methods for contact mechanics.

His broader interests include solid continuum mechanics, numerical methods, and pneumatically actuated metamaterials and structures.

Riccardo Voso

His research focuses on variational methods applied to soft materials with surface energy. Alongside his work with the group, Riccardo is a postdoctoral researcher in Mathematics at the Institute of Information Theory and Automation (UTIA), Czech Academy of Sciences, in Martin Kružík’s research group. He received his PhD in Mathematics from the University of Vienna under Ulisse Stefanelli.

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.