Living engineered materials
We envision materials systems that embody the essential characteristics of living things—dynamic, adaptive, resilient, and sustainable. Building on breakthroughs in bioinspired, smart, and multifunctional materials, we are now advancing toward living engineered materials that unite sensing, actuation, computing, self-healing, self-powering, and adaptive responses within a single platform. These systems leverage the robustness, regenerative capacity, and self-regulating potential of biological systems to create programmable, multifunctional materials unlike anything conventional engineering has achieved.
Our goal is to develop materials that:
- Exhibit dynamic, adaptive properties
- Self-heal, regenerate, and extend lifespans
- Are resilient and robust under stress
- Self-replicate or reconfigure
- Can be recycled or reabsorbed into the environment
- Harvest, transduce, and store energy
Topic Lead
Penn State
Topic Lead: Living engineered Materials
Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Seed Grants
Spatially Controlled Stiffness in Patterned Shape-Changing Hydrogels
This project proposes to develop a co-design framework for spatially controlled stiffness in hydrogels by integrating photoswitchable chemistry with droplet-based multi-material printing, enabling programmable shape- and stiffness-changing materials for adaptive systems with applications in medicine and robotics.
Principal Investigators
Joseph Najem
Penn State
Celine Calvino
University of Freiburg
Scalable Nanomanufacturing Technique for Bioinspired Nonpigmented Colored Fabrics
Principal Investigators
Akhlesh Lakhtakia
Penn State
Günter Reiter
University of Freiburg