Abstract: Many mechanical deformations, such as buckling, crumpling, wrinkling, collapsing, and delamination, are usually considered as threats to mechanical integrity and are avoided or reduced in the traditional design of materials and structures. My work goes against these conventions by tailoring such mechanical instabilities to create new functional morphologies. We use ultralow bending stiffness and semiconducting properties of atomically-thin van der Waals (vdW) materials to enable emerging mechanically-coupled properties and device-level multi-functionalities that extend beyond those of bulk material systems.…