Work led by the newly minted Dr. Cai is now published in Materials Horizons. In “Regulating hydrogel mechanical properties with an electric field,” Dr. Cai designs a gel that is stable despite having strong saloplasticity (getting 5x stiffer when all of the salt is removed) and then shows how external electric fields can be used to regulate stiffness by regulating salt transport. He then demonstrates how this innovation could be applied for haptic devices. Max Tepermeister helped with system design and a special thanks co-author to Chenyun Yuan from Prof Ober’s group for sharing his scanning electron microscopy expertise.