Dr. Alavi’s primary focus lies in the exploration, design, additive manufacturing, and computational modeling of novel engineered material systems (e.g. mechanical metamaterials, composites). His team strives to gain a comprehensive understanding of the mechanics and electronics of these material systems across multiple scales. Dr. Alavi’s vision is to equip these engineered material systems with “a level of cognition” and “primitive intelligence” by seamlessly integrating advanced functionalities into their fabric. The created intelligent material systems and structures can then deploy their cognitive abilities for sensing, self-powering, information processing, and communicating to interact with the surrounding environments, optimize their response, and create a sense–decide–respond loop. In this area, Dr. Alavi has coined the groundbreaking concept of “meta-tribomaterials” and initiated the scientific field of “mechanical metamaterial electronics (meta-mechanotronics)”, a field that couples engineering domains of mechanical metamaterials, digital electronics and nano energy harvesting. Meta-mechanotronics can build the foundation for designing truly intelligent material systems and structures at nano, micro and macro scales. The meta-mechanotronic systems simply rely on their constituent components to sense, self-power, compute, and wirelessly communicate, without using any external power source or additional electronics. These advanced functionalities can be recognized as new material properties, alongside traditional material/metamaterial properties (e.g. strength and stiffness).