Please contact the symposium organizers with questions.

Morphologically and compositionally structured materials enable new functionalities in a broad range of fields, including optics, electronics, and mechanics. Structuring matter for performance enhancement is a key concept not only in synthetic materials but also in natural systems. Biological materials are often structured across various length scales, which imparts specific functionality vital to the host organism. These materials have provided rich inspiration for scientists and engineers to develop new technologies with optimized performance. The emerging scientific intersection of engineered metamaterials and biological structured matter, bringing together experts in materials science, chemistry, physics, biology, and engineering, will lead to new fundamental understanding, design approaches, novel fabrication techniques, and practical applications.

The proposed symposium will focus on emerging biological and bioinspired materials (nano- to mesoscale, 2D and 3D, soft and hard, or hybrid configuration), their working principle and fundamental properties, multiscale formation processes, fabrication strategies (self-assembly, additive, scalable), and advanced functionalities for electronic, photonic and mechanical applications. This symposium aims at bringing together leading scientists from diverse backgrounds and technical fields across academia and industry to share cutting-edge progress on theoretical and experimental fundamental research, highlight the latest innovations, and stimulate discussions on the impact and challenges of manmade and biological structured materials.

Topics will include:

• Biological and biomimetic materials: multifunctionality, adaptive, and dynamic properties
• Complex, disordered and multiscale materials formation and phenomena
• Theory and modelling of novel properties of biological and bioinspired materials
• Prediction of bioinspired material properties and design using machine learning and AI
• Scalable fabrication: multiscale structuring, self-assembly, additive manufacturing
• Characterization, imaging and spectroscopy of biological and bioinspired materials
• Applications of bioinspired materials in photonics, electronics, mechanics, sensing, energy and medicine

Invited Speakers:

• Joanna Aizenberg (Harvard University, USA)
• Esther Amstad (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland)
• Eric Appel (Stanford University, USA)
• Hyuck Choo (Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, Republic of Korea)
• Leila Deravi (Northeastern University, USA)
• Hendrik Hoelscher (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany)
• Ling Li (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, USA)
• Admir Masic (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
• Rox Middleton (University of Bristol, United Kingdom)
• Benjamin Palmer (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel)
• Yael Politi (Technische Universität Dresden, Germany)
• Gerd Schroeder-Turk (Murdoch University, Australia)
• Jan Totz (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
• Daniel Wagner (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel)
• Li Wen (Beihang University, China)
• Lauren Zarzar (The Pennsylvaia State University, USA)

Symposium Organizers