Call for Papers

Please contact the symposium organizers with questions.

This symposium will broadly cover the current status and future research trends in emerging smart and living materials. Smart materials can be defined as stimuli-responsive materials, capable of sensing external stimuli and responding to them through physical, chemical or biological changes, allowing their usage in a wide variety of applications. Among several families of responsive materials, living materials with embedded archaea, bacteria, and eukaryotic cells, are emerging as the most promising ones in recent years due to their "living" features, including self-healing and self-regeneration. Given the extensive landscape of smart and living materials and the radical change due to the development of design and fabrication (including 3D and 4D (bio)printing) of these matters in unprecedented ways, it is fundamental to exchange good practices and strategies for effectively utilizing these materials and empowering them towards true societal transformations. In this symposium, we aim to bring together the community of living materials and abiotic smart materials to initiate a knowledge exchange and strengthen mutual interests and overlaps. The symposium will focus on the evolution of smart and living materials, their underlying working principles, process development, and integration into devices. The emphasis will be on the engineering of these materials and derived structures and applications, starting from the basic scientific principles, mathematical modeling, and processing through novel fabrication technologies, including synthetic biology, 3D bioprinting, additive manufacturing, and electrohydrodynamic printing, to name a few, and their deployment to a broader range of end-use cases. Smart and living materials may include but are not limited to, shape-morphing materials, shape-memory materials, electroactive materials, responsive biofilms, biohybrid materials, and biohybrid actuators. The speakers in the symposium should address the fundamental scientific background to their topic, scientific challenges, the involvement of smart or living materials in their solution, and future directions in the interface between materials science, synthetic biology and engineering design.

Topics will include:

• Smart materials and structures for intelligent engineering systems
• Engineered living materials, including biohybrid living materials and biological living materials
• Biohybrid materials, devices, systems, living smart matter
• Stimuli responsive materials with bioinspired and biomimetic features
• Biomimetic materials, structures, and architectures with quasi living behabior
• Synthetic biology for engineering materials: current capabilities and challenges
• Novel synthesis routes through chemical, mechanical or biological self-assembly
• Fabrication and characterization of living and smart materials
• Applications of living and smart materials
• Ethical, legal, and social aspects related to the technological development of smart and living materials
• Sustainable design approaches and life cycle assessment of smart and living materials for advanced engineering systems

Invited Speakers:

• Caroline Ajo-Franklin (Rice University, USA)
• Mahdi Bodaghi (Nottingham Trent University, United Kingdom)
• Aránzazu del Campo (INM–Leibniz Institute for New Materials, Germany)
• Mette Ebbesen (Aalborg University, Denmark)
• Christoph Eberl (Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials IWM, Germany)
• Matthew Fields (Montana State University, USA)
• Zhibin Guan (University of California, Irvine, USA)
• Chris Hernandez (University of California, San Francisco, USA)
• Aitziber Lopez Cortajarena (CIC biomaGUNE, Spain)
• Anne Meyer (University of Rochester, USA)
• Jon Molina Aldareguia (IMDEA Materials Institute, Spain)
• Sara Molinari (University of Maryland, USA)
• Alisa Morss Clyne (University of Maryland, USA)
• Alshakim Nelson (University of Washington, USA)
• Jenny Sabin (Cornell University, USA)
• Thomas Speck (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany)
• Will V Srubar III (University of Colorado Boulder, USA)
• Taylor Ware (Texas A&M University, USA)
• Tak-Sing Wong (The Pennsylvania State University, USA)
• Ryo Yoshida (The University of Tokyo, Japan)
• Rayne Zhang (University of California, Berkeley, USA)

Symposium Organizers