This Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award will be used to study the mechanics of interlocking granular materials that consist of hard, interlocking elements assembled into soft, deformable materials, and their ability to enable shape-shifting structures. Soft materials have been essential to innovations in tissue engineering, soft robotics, stretchable electronics, among many other applications; however, their mechanical behavior is hard to tune and scaling them for nano- to meter-scale applications (e.g., from miniaturized medical devices to meter-scale reconfigurable structures) is challenging. Since the underlying structure of interlocking granular materials can be precisely tailored using optimization and advanced manufacturing, they have higher potential to be engineered for targeted behavior than traditional soft materials. This research will address the key challenge of understanding the fundamental deformation and failure mechanisms of interlocking granular materials and develop computational models for design and analysis purposes. Furthermore, a partnership between the research team and a workforce development program at Georgia Tech will enable long-term immersion of high-school students into the research and provide a platform to pilot educational materials related to interlocking granular materials for release to the broader engineering education community. Interlocking granular materials lie at the intersection of traditional architected materials (e.g., truss lattices) with rigidly connected constituents and traditional granular materials (e.g., gravels) with disconnected constituents. Their mechanics differs from the former in that they can “flow” via relative movement of their particles and from the latter in that their ability to “flow” is limited by collision of the particles in tension as well as in compression. Topological interlocking is the key distinguishing feature that prompts a different theoretical and numerical tre