Research

Research Overview

Polymers, composites, and soft biomaterials underpin technologies ranging from aircraft and marine structures to soft robots, medical devices, drug delivery, and tissue engineering. Their lightweight nature, manufacturability, and broad range of mechanical and biological properties make them essential to both modern engineering and healthcare. However, most are manufactured with fixed structures and functions. Their internal architectures are difficult to control across scales, their properties cannot readily adapt during use, and their complex compositions often make repair, recycling, and material recovery challenging.

These limitations matter most in demanding, dynamic environments. Engineering structures must withstand damage, changing loads, and harsh conditions while using less material and energy. Biomedical materials must accommodate differences among patients, match evolving tissues, and deliver therapeutic functions without invasive procedures. Addressing these needs requires materials that can do more than maintain a predetermined state: they must be designed to form hierarchical structures, respond to their surroundings, and undergo controlled transformation throughout their life cycle.

Natural materials provide powerful design principles. Their combinations of strength, toughness, adaptability, and resource efficiency arise from multiscale organization—including weak and strong bonds, soft and hard components, interconnected phases, and responsive interfaces. These structures are not static; they reorganize through interactions with mechanical, chemical, and biological environments. Translating these principles into engineered systems requires a deeper understanding of how material structures form, how they evolve under applied stimuli, and how those changes affect subsequent properties and functions.

Light and sound offer unusual opportunities to address these questions. Both can deliver energy with spatial and temporal precision to initiate reactions, drive transport, reorganize interfaces, and change material properties. Light provides high-resolution control of photochemical processes, while focused ultrasound can penetrate optically opaque materials and biological tissues and generate localized thermal and mechanical effects. Ultrasound can also combine imaging with energy delivery, creating opportunities to monitor and control material transformation in real time. We therefore study light and sound not simply as processing tools, but as programmable fields for shaping how materials form, function, and change. Our research is organized into three connected thrusts:

1. Adaptive (Bio)materials Composites

We study how dynamic bonds, network topologies, phase structures, and interfaces evolve under stimuli and govern material mechanics, adaptation, transport, degradation, and biological function. These principles guide the design of self-healing materials, shape-changing structures, and cell-instructive biomaterials.

2. Field-Programmed (de)Manufacturing and smart manufacturing

We investigate how light and sound couple with reactions, transport, and mechanics to program material structures across scales. The knowledge enables developing light- and sound-based additive manufacturing of hierarchical composites, manufacturing-enabled damage-tolerant structures, and demanufacturing. We also combine multiphysics modeling and real-time monitoring to develop a digital twin of manufacturing for precision manufacturing processes.

3. Adaptive Biointerfaces and Multifunctional (Bio)systems

We combine adaptive biomaterials and advanced manufacturing to create biointerfaces that respond dynamically to living tissues.  Applications include adaptive implants, cell-instructive scaffolds, minimally invasive bioprinting, drug delivery, and image-guided material remodeling.

Over the long term, we envision materials whose full life cycles can be programmed: formed with designed internal structures, adapted or repaired during use, monitored and remodeled in complex environments, and selectively disassembled when no longer needed. This research connects fundamental materials and manfuacturing science with practical advances in engineering, sustainability, and precision health,