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Hybrid Living Coatings to Detect Structural Damage
“Mechanically Driven Bacteria‐Based Crack Detection” led by PhD candidate Ellen van Wijngaarden is now published in RSC Materials Advances! In a collaborative work with the Giometto, Brito, and Bouklas labs at Cornell, we created a biohybrid coating that embeds bacterial spores into a polymer layer, enabling the material to sense and respond to damage for […]
Welcome to Zoë Masters
Welcome to Mechanical Engineering PhD candidate Zoë Masters – the newest addition to the MMD lab (officially joined in December)! Zoë will be focusing on experimental mechanics for both living and synthetic materials.
Living Architecture!
Ellen van Wijngaarden and Meredith Silberstein have a new paper out in Materials Advances on scalable manufacturing with freeform deposition of mycelium-bound composites. This work is in collaboration with the Wisniewska lab in Cornell’s Architecture department.
MMD Lab at SES
MMD lab members Ellen van Wijngaarden, Si Chen, Jaehee Lee, and Meredith Silberstein all presented at the Society of Engineering Science annual technical meeting in Atlanta last week. The team also caught up with MMD alumni Rob Wagner (now faculty at Binghamton University) and Allison Rzepka (now a PhD student at University of Illinois)!
New Paper in Nature Communications
Our lab is excited to share that Dr. Si Chen, ELMI and Fleming Postdoctoral Fellow, is the first author of our new paper, “Fibrous network nature of plant cell walls enables tunable mechanics for development,” published in Nature Communications. This interdisciplinary study, at the interface of solid mechanics and plant developmental biology, was made possible […]
Advancing Ionic Circuits!
A new paper, “Harnessing ionic complexity: A modeling approach for hierarchical ionic circuit design” is now out in APS Physical Review Applied and was led by Dr. Max Tepermeister. In this work, we developed a flexible circuit-like model for designing and understanding the behavior of ionic circuitry. Our model allows designers to approach ionic circuitry […]
Congratulations Max!
Dr. Max Tepermeister successfully defended his PhD thesis “Ionic and Chemical Systems Modeling”. He’ll be starting this fall as the Cecil and Sally Drinkward Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech.
Regulating Hydrogel Stiffness with Electric Fields
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 […]
Congrats Hongyi!
Congratulations Dr. Hongyi Cai for successfully defending his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering earlier this month! Also, thanks for choosing the best kind of celebration (Cornell Dairy Bar Ice Cream)!!!
Complex Active and Adaptive Material Systems GRC
Max Tepermeister and Si Chen participated Complex Active and Adaptive Material Systems Gordon Research Seminar and Gordon Research Conference at the end of January in sunny Ventura, CA. This year’s theme was Active and Biomimetic Materials That Embody Intelligence. Si presented her work on engineering mechanics and growth of plant leaves. And Max won best […]
Mechanics for Material Design 