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The membrane curvature of cells and intracellular compartments continuously adapts to enable cells to perform vital functions, from cell division to signal trafficking. Understanding how membrane geometry affects these processes in vivo is…
Micro-transfer printing is an assembly technology that enables large-scale integration of diverse materials and components from micro- to nano-scale. However, traditional micro-transfer printing technologies lack dynamic selectivity,…
Controlling the polarization and wavefront of light is essential for compact photonic systems in modern science and technology. This may be achieved by metasurfaces, a new platform that has radically changed the way people engineer…
Thermoresponsive microgels are soft colloids that find widespread use as model systems for soft matter physics. Their complex internal architecture, made of a disordered and heterogeneous polymer network, has been so far a major challenge…
Modeling biological soft tissue is complex in part due to material heterogeneity. Microstructural patterns, which play a major role in defining the mechanical behavior of these tissues, are both challenging to characterize, and difficult to…
A diffuse-interface model for microstructure with an arbitrary number of components and phases was developed from basic thermodynamic and kinetic principles and formalized within a variational framework. The model includes a composition…
Porous poly(ionic liquid)s (PILs) recently have been actively serving as a multifunctional, interdisciplinary materials platform in quite a few research areas, including separation, catalysis, actuator, sensor, and energy storage, just to…
Patterning solid surfaces with varying wettability is important to manage droplets in microfluidics, heat transfer and printing. Solid surface roughness poses fundamental limitations including contact-line pinning and solid friction. Here,…
Soft interfaces formed by lipid membranes are fundamental to living cells, synthetic cells, and membrane-based soft materials. However, a quantitative framework linking molecular organization with nonlinear interfacial mechanics remains…
Analysis of molecular scale interactions and chemical structure offers an enormous opportunity to tune material properties for targeted applications. However, designing materials from molecular scale is a grand challenge owing to the…
Constructing precise micro-nano metal patterns on complex three-dimensional (3D) plastic parts allows the fabrication of functional devices for advanced applications. However, this patterning is currently expensive and requires complex…
We devised a general heterogeneous microstructural design methodology applied to a specific material system, elasto-electro-active piezoelectric ceramic embedded plastics, which has great potential in sensing, 5G communication, and energy…
The study of the interactions of living adherent cells with mechanically stable (visco)elastic materials enables understanding and exploiting physiological phenomena mediated by cell-extracellular communication. However, insight on the…
A reduced model, which can fold both helix and sheet structures, is proposed to study the problem of protein folding. The goal of this model is to find an unbiased effective potential that has included the effects of water and at the same…
Making use of a simplified model for protein folding, it can be shown that conformations which are particularly stable when their energy is minimized with respect to amino acid sequence (in the sense that they display a large energy gap to…
Machine learning models can assist with metamaterials design by approximating computationally expensive simulators or solving inverse design problems. However, past work has usually relied on black box deep neural networks, whose reasoning…
Microgels are colloidal-scale particles individually made of crosslinked polymer networks that can swell and deswell in response to external stimuli, such as changes to temperature or pH. Despite a large amount of experimental activities on…
The recent decades have seen various attempts at accelerating the process of developing materials targeted towards specific applications. The performance required for a particular application leads to the choice of a particular material…
Membrane proteins and lipids can self-assemble into membrane protein polyhedral nanoparticles (MPPNs). MPPNs have a closed spherical surface and a polyhedral protein arrangement, and may offer a new route for structure determination of…
The task of learning patterns is typically associated with systems that update parameters on fixed architectures, such as neural networks, where learning proceeds through continuous optimization. Here, we demonstrate that pattern learning…