Professor Valentine presents to the UCSD MAE Department

Professor Valentine describes the group's work on Harnessing nature’s ingenuity to make tough and stimuli-responsive materials to the Biomechanics & Medical Devices Seminar in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at UC San Diego.  

Abstract: Nature is replete with extraordinary materials that can grow, move, respond, and adapt. These have long served as an inspiration for synthetic and biomaterials design. By developing a foundational understanding of the structure-mechanics relationships of marine adhesives, my laboratory has developed high-performance polymer materials that are extremely strong without compromising extensibility, as well as multiphase porous materials with tunable toughness and strength. More recently, we have drawn inspiration from biological processing to develop methods that allow for precise spatiotemporal property control. By leveraging the light transduction pathways of highly- absorbing, negatively photochromic molecules, we have developed a suite of stimuli-responsive materials and have demonstrated the utility of light as a means of remote control and power. We have used these approaches to drive the motion in a range of engineered systems, ranging from liquid flows to amorphous polymeric materials to soft actuators. Together, these innovations open the door to a wide range of applications in packaging, connective tissue repair, soft robotics, and optofluidics.