Folding the future: Origami helping Rice engineer Novelino transform materials, structures

When Larissa Novelino began her engineering career, she never imagined she’d spend her days folding paper.

“I was never the crafty, artistic type,” Novelino said. “My mom still can’t believe I ended up working with origami.”

Now an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University, Novelino has built her research on a surprising foundation: the centuries-old Japanese art of paper folding. But in her lab, origami isn’t about creating cranes and swans — it’s about transforming how we design buildings, materials and machines.

Origami engineering takes the geometric principles behind folding and applies them to real-world challenges, creating structures that are compact when stored but transform into strong, functional shapes when deployed. Novelino uses these principles to design everything from portable emergency shelters to lightweight materials with unique mechanical properties.

The possibilities, she said, are endless.

“Through geometry, you can design how a material behaves — its stiffness, weight, even how it responds in different directions,” Novelino said. “You can make something deployable in one direction, then stiff and load bearing in another.”

Novelino says one of her biggest ambitions is to change the way we approach construction, using principles of origami to make it safer and more efficient.

“Construction is dangerous work. If we can design structures that fold flat, transport easily and deploy with minimal human risk, we can make job sites safer,” she said. “That’s not just innovation for the sake of novelty; that’s innovation that protects lives.”

Novelino’s designs aren’t limited to buildings. She has worked on origami-inspired electromagnetic filters that can change their operational frequency simply by shifting shape and soft robots that use origami folds to “snap” into new positions and perform different tasks.

“Origami gives you a way to visualize and test these concepts right in front of you,” Novelino said. “You can prototype with paper and explore ideas hands-on and then scale them up with advanced materials.”

At Rice, her students quickly learn that in Novelino’s classroom, you don’t just solve equations, you fold them.

“They are always surprised at how much folding a piece of paper can teach them about geometry, mechanics and design,” she said. “It’s an accessible, tangible way to understand concepts that can feel abstract on a computer screen.”

Growing up in Belém, Brazil, Novelino says she always excelled in math, but she found her path to origami engineering almost by accident. While pursuing her master’s in structural engineering, she connected with a U.S. professor whose work had shifted from traditional computational mechanics to origami-inspired structures.

“It was nice to have a break from the computer and instead use laser cutters and 3D printers and actually make things,” Novelino said. “One of the things I loved the most is that I’m terrible at visualizing things, and being able to fold these structures in my hands and see how those patterns behave has been so important to my work. It’s really the perfect mix for me — it’s still math and mechanics but with this whole new layer of understanding.”