Research
Our vision is to make healthcare less invasive and more accessible to all by developing mechanically dynamic materials and devices, and finding creative ways to apply them to solve biomedical (and other) challenges. We achieve this by designing new dynamic functional materials, leveraging chemistry and physics at multiple length scales.
Current Research
New materials. We tackle high risk, high reward problems—where it is particularly challenging to achieve something mechanically dynamic that still retains the material's primary functionality. Dynamic mechanical properties include injectability, biodegradability, reconfigurability, self-healing, stretchability, and stimuli-responsiveness.
For example, we are interested in designing materials that can be introduced into the body via a minimally-invasive needle injection, while still retaining:
- high electrical conductivity
- the ability to sustain large mechanical loads
- well-defined architectures and anisotropy
Such materials could greatly increase access to next-generation bio-electronic devices, prosthetics, implants, and more.
To create these materials, we primarily use tools from the realm of soft matter: granular materials, polymers, hydrogels, suspensions, and liquid metals. Nonetheless, we also explore novel design strategies that blur traditional boundaries between "hard" and "soft" materials.
Biomedical applications. We aim to identify opportunities for dynamic functional materials to reduce demand on clinicians and make medical procedures more accessible to all. Materials with dynamic mechanical properties could enable more autonomous, low-power, and adaptable versions of clinical tools that perform key operations, such as:
- grasping
- navigation
- sampling
- palpation
- drug delivery
- wound repair
- sensing
We are interested in applications of dynamic materials on their own, or when incorporated into larger-scale medical devices and soft robotics systems.