Our society is currently facing unprecedented challenges in health, energy, and the environment, which have created a strong demand in new materials which are renewable, multifunctional, light-weight, and can interact with human more safely and intelligently. Soft materials are a promising candidate for this purpose. The overarching goal of the our Group is to harness soft materials, such as active matter, liquid crystals, polymers, colloids, metamaterials, and their composites to design next-generation, autonomous materials and soft machines.

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Specifically, our group will employ traditional and emerging computational methods, including machine learning, to propose novel soft materials with nontraditional functionalities, features, and dynamics. Examples include active fluids with tailorable flow patterns, multiphase systems sensitive to specific stimuli, and origami materials with novel shape-changing behaviors in response to external fields. These new soft materials are promising for soft robotics, wearable devices, space exploration, 4D printing, energy harvesting, smart buildings, sensing and diagnosis, and etc.

 

Our group strives to borrow the wisdom from biological systems and design synthetic materials and machines that are low-cost, green, biocompatible, and intelligent. Our research is multidisciplinary, covering Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Materials Science, Chemical and Mechanical Engineering.