Jan-Hendrik Bastek studied Industrial Engineering at the Technical University of Braunschweig and Mechanical Engineering at ETH Zürich, receiving his M.Sc. degree in 2019. His master thesis, which was awarded the ETH medal, introduced a new theoretical-numerical framework to predict the behavior of viscoelastic beam structures.

After a brief stint in management consulting, he joined the Mechanics & Materials Lab at ETH Zürich as a Doctoral Student under the supervision of Prof. Dennis Kochmann in 2020.

His research interests lie at the intersection of mechanics and scientific machine learning, where he is investigating both data-driven (e.g., inverse design of metamaterials) and data-free methods such as Physics-Informed Neural Networks (e.g., for shell theory) as alternatives to established numerical frameworks.