Somerville, MA
Portrait of Siavash Khosh Sokhan Monfared
Siavash Khosh Sokhan Monfared

Siavash Monfared is a computational physicist with a deep interest in collective behavior and the dynamics of self-organization in living and artificial systems.

Single agent

banna

A provider-agnostic ReAct agent harness. Works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, or local Ollama models. Comes with custom tools (web search, file and PDF readers, a Python sandbox, shell, memory) and connects to MCP servers.

pip install banna
GitHub ↗
Many agents

bannaha

A mini agentic team. Mix agents from different harnesses (Anthropic SDK, OpenAI Agents SDK, Google ADK, Hermes, banna) on different backends (direct API, OpenRouter, Bedrock), then pick how they work together: solo, vote, or shared blackboard.

pip install "bannaha[all]"
GitHub ↗

Education and appointments.

2025 – Present
AI Venture Originator
2022 – 2025
Postdoctoral Scholar
Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen
★ FellowshipLeon Rosenfeld Foundation Fellowship
2022 – 2025
Visiting Scholar
Department of Physics, Harvard University
2019 – 2022
Postdoctoral Scholar
Division of Engineering & Applied Science, Caltech
2015 – 2019
PhD Candidate
Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, MIT

Mathematical models, deep learning and high-performance computation, used to extract fundamental insight from complex systems.

Fig. 02 3D multi-phase-field tissue
01

Active matter & biological physics

How does collective behavior emerge in dense, soft multicellular systems? Using multi-phase-field models I study how mechanical forces, stress transmission, and topological defects drive self-organization, from tissue morphogenesis to cell competition and extrusion.

Fig. 03 S-shaped granular particles simulation
02

Granular physics

Granular matter is everywhere, but the role of particle topology in collective behavior is not well understood. I study systems composed of non-convex particles: how shape drives packing, force transmission, and structure formation in regimes where classical convex-grain intuition breaks down.

Fig. 04 Coarse-grained lattice-gas DFT simulation of a confined fluid
03

Confined fluids & porous materials

Bulk and confined fluids behave very differently. Pore morphology, topology, and fluid–solid interactions reshape the energy landscape. I develop models that resolve capillary phase transitions and confinement effects in disordered porous aggregates.

Fig. 05 Mechanics of heterogeneous solids
04

Mechanics of heterogeneous solids

Heterogeneous and disordered solids resist simple continuum descriptions. I work on stress transmission, criticality, and the statistical physics of deformation in strongly heterogeneous systems, often borrowing tools from non-equilibrium physics.

Recent entries: papers, awards, and preprints.