My name is Paul Ducarme. I am a postdoc at Northwestern University (nearby Chicago), working in the Adaptive Structures Lab and the Embodied System Lab. I focus on understanding how to make buildings with life-like attributes, which can better adapt to and regulate the environment in passive ways, by leveraging mechanical instabilities.

More on my current project and other postdoc fellows' research visions in the same program can be found here.

I obtained my PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 2026, after conducting my doctoral research at AMOLF and ARCNL institues.

I am generally fascinated in the complexity hidden in ordinary things. I am attracted to things simple in appearance yet leading to rich or surprising properties. I believe that studying them is the perfect opportunity to get closer to a deeper and fundamental understanding of physics, or to inspire new inventions.

In particular, I am interested in uncovering the complex phenomenology originating from nonlinearities and instabilities in mechanical systems. For example, building blocks capable of snap-through instabilities pop in non-trivial sequences when loaded in series. Or, softening, stiffening and nonmonotonic blocks can form structures able to suddenly shorten while increasingly tensioned! What else could we achieve using seemingly simple mechanical entities? What do those structure teach us about the interplay between geometry and elasticity?

In this quest, I often find myself designing and fabricating parts with new architectures. I really enjoy that process. It lets your creativity develop and brings together the savvy garnered through many stages of life — sense of aesthetics and symmetry, math and geometry, computer-aided drawings, dexterity, handling tools and machines, testing, iterating.

To guide the design process and gain insights in the physics, I like to develop my custom simulation tools based on simplified models. More often than not, I find that these models are better suited over FEA simulations. I believe there are two types of models: the stripped down ones to gain insights, the realistic ones to make quantitative predictions.

In my free time, I like zipping through the city on uni-/bicycles (those are the most beautiful purely-mechanical inventions), clicking photos, strumming the ukulele, embarking on deep Wikipedia safaris, and hopping into some pick-up soccer.

If you want to connect, feel free to email me at paulducarme@hotmail.com, follow me on github, or message me on linkedin.

My cv can be viewed here (updated last in Feb 2026).