Research

Challenges & Opportunities

Q: How do we make functional materials mechanically robust and sustainable?

Q: How to enable widespread translation of metamaterials?

Mission & Vision

Our group aims to develop sustainable, robust, and multifunctional metamaterial systems to solve global challenges.

We are interested in developing metamaterials from the ground up—starting with sustainable building blocks, and advancing through scalable manufacturing, optimized architectures, and multifunctional devices.

Research Overview

Functional materials underpin many emerging technologies, from energy harvesting and catalysis to flexible electronics and soft robotics. Yet their widespread adoption remains limited by intrinsic mechanical constraints such as intrinsic brittleness, low interfacial strength, and low fracture toughness under diverse operating conditions. Mechanical metamaterials—materials with architected internal geometries—offer a promising route to overcome these limitations by enabling properties once thought mutually exclusive, such as ceramics that are lightweight and resilient. Despite this promise, their technological impact remains constrained by two major challenges. First, scalable fabrication and integration into functional systems remain difficult, as most studies focus on small-scale laboratory samples optimized for stiffness and strength. Second, their behavior under dynamic and extreme environments, as well as their coupling with functional performance, remains largely underexplored. These gaps highlight an opportunity to bridge mechanical metamaterials and active material systems to create next-generation devices that are simultaneously robust and functional.

Our research explores how architectural design and size effects can fundamentally redefine material performance. By structuring matter across length scales, we enable rigid materials to become tougher and more stretchable, and design lightweight architectures that outperform conventional structural alloys like steel in impact resistance. At small scales, we exploit size effects to achieve unique responses otherwise unattainable in monolithic materials, such as imparting resilience to metals and ceramics, approaching rubber-like behavior. We also integrate self-assembly with additive manufacturing to scale three-dimensional nanostructures into the macroscale. Finally, we combine these principles with functional materials to realize mechanically robust, high-performance devices. Guided by sustainability and industrial relevance, our group targets to translate fundamental innovations into real-world applications.

Research Areas

Design of tough metamaterials

We are interested in designing tough, lightweight metamaterials that overcome traditional trade-offs in existing materials by combining architected geometries with nanoscale mechanics. Building on experimentally validated design frameworks that enable rare property combinations, such as high stiffness with extreme stretchability, we aim to employ a closed-loop, AI-driven multiscale workflow that integrates machine learning with physics-based modeling, fabrication, and characterization to efficiently explore vast design spaces and accelerate the translation of architected materials from simulation to high-performance engineering applications.

Sustainable and scalable nanomanufacturing

We are interested in developing scalable fabrication and hybrid nanomanufacturing strategies that combines additive manufacturing and self-assembly processes to embed nanoscale features into macroscale architectures. These approaches are guided by sustainability, leveraging recyclable and biobased materials, energy-efficient processing, and minimal-waste manufacturing to enable robust, application-ready metamaterials.

Multiscale characterization under extreme conditions

We are studying how architected materials perform under dynamic loading and extreme temperatures, conditions that better reflect real-world use than conventional room-temperature experiments. By combining multiscale experiments and in situ characterization, we uncover the deformation and failure mechanisms that govern performance from the nanoscale to the macroscale, enabling predictive design rules and scalable architectures for applications ranging from impact-resistant packaging to high-temperature energy systems.

Multifunctional devices

We are developing multifunctional metamaterials that overcome traditional trade-offs between mechanical robustness and functional performance. Through multimodal, device-level characterization, we aim to reveal how mechanical deformation interacts with electrical, thermal, and chemical functionality in engineering systems. To accelerate translation, we will also establish standardized testing platforms that replicate real-world operating conditions, generate reliable datasets for AI-driven design, and align metamaterial performance evaluation with industry and regulatory requirements.

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