Fascinating rheological properties like shear thickening/thinning and anisotropic viscosity arise from underlying structure in complex fluids. We develop and use techniques to simultaneously analyze emergent, large-scale properties and image particle-level positions and stresses in such suspensions.
The structure-function relationships of biological materials are critical to understating tissue development, function, disease, and therapy. We use custom-built devices to simultaneously study structure and mechanics of biological tissues.
Living organisms navigate space in a fascinating variety of ways, most of which require exquisite control. We look at locomotor behavior across a wide range of scales, from the flight of individual insects to the collective motion of people.
In addition to making beautiful art, folding 2D materials can be used to tune mechanical properties and create novel three-dimensional structures. Because the mathematical description of origami is scale-free, folding principles can be applied to materials over a vast range of spatial scales.
Humans enjoy telling and listening to great stories--these stories help us make sense of the world around us. Communicating scientific results should be no exception. We study how scientific presentations can become more like gripping stories, so that the ideas conveyed can have the greatest impact possible.
Magnetic materials provide a unique solution to a long-standing challenge in material science: the development of a scale-invariant technology which uses simple building blocks to build smart, digital, and structurally complex materials.
We developed a micron-scale actuator that seamlessly integrates with semiconductor processing and responds to standard electronic control signals and used it to prototype sub-hundred micrometer walking robots, which contain microactuator-based legs and on-board photovoltaic power supply.
