The American Physical Society annually awards a series of honors, prizes and awards to recognize excellence in contributions to physics research, service, and teaching. The research awards are divided by subject, one of these being the Early Career Award in  Soft Matter Research, Coulais' field of research.

Coulais combines additive manufacturing, precision-desktop experiments, numerical methods and theory inspired from condensed matter to create soft materials that blur the boundary between material and machine. His best-known works include combinatorial metamaterials that exhibit advanced shape morphing and non-reciprocal active metamaterials that exhibit non-Hermitian wave phenomena.

Coulais received his BSc and MSc from École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (FR) in 2009, and earned his PhD at CEA Saclay and University Pierre and Marie Curie (FR) in 2012 for work on the fluctuations and mechanical response of granular media at the Jamming transition. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Leiden University and AMOLF, investigating flexible mechanical metamaterials. In 2016, he received a NWO Veni grant before moving top the University of Amsterdam, where he has been a faculty member at the Institute of Physics since 2017. Since then he has received the ERC Starting and Proof-of-concept grants, the NWO Vidi grant and multiple grants in collaboration with industry.

The award will be presented at the Award Ceremony of the March Meeting of the American Physical Society, which will take place March 3-8, 2024.