Living materials are extremely complex. For example, articular cartilage, a natural hydrogel that contains 70% water, can maintain impressively high fracture toughness under millions of load cycles. Skeletal muscles can achieve high actuation stress, strain, and energy efficiency, while operating over decades. Mussel secretes soft glues to form robust adhesion to rocks and metals in flowing water with high salinity. Learning from the complexity of nature invariably leads to the design of composite structures, including those that rely on not only solid but also viscoelastic or liquid components. An emerging strategy is to employ synthetic hydrogels and elastomers as component building blocks to develop next-generation materials that can exist at the interface between humans and machines.


Hybrid soft materials based on hydrogel technologies open new avenues for novel dynamic adaptive mechanisms and new multifunctional materials. The liquid component provides a medium to host chemical reactions, which allows for the incorporation of different intelligently designed elements. Their hybrid nature offers tremendous combinatorial potential for mixing and matching a broad range of inputs and outputs. Newly emerging manufacturing techniques also bring new space for design. The understanding of how to integrate these recent advances in material properties and function (e.g. toughness, self-healing, multi-functional hydrogels) with manufacturing (3D/4D printing) for the purpose of building smart materials and intelligent machines is incomplete.


This symposium has immense scope, ranging from fundamental mechanics, physics, and materials science research to applications. The following scientific questions will be discussed: What are nature’s strategies in designing various soft living materials and intelligent machines? What fabrication methods enable soft materials that possess properties and functions like living organisms? Is it possible to integrate both soft living and engineered machines to create new forms of machines or life? The symposium will cover a variety of interdisciplinary topics related to smart hydrogel materials, data science, lab-on-a-chip, and computational modeling, which will promote the molecular-level understanding and practical development of next-generation smart, living hydrogels from fundamentals toward applications at different length scales and timescales.

actuation adaptive adhesive autonomous biomedical ionic conductor robotics sensor shape-shifting tunable