Soft materials such as hydrogels, elastomers, and foams exhibit unique mechanical features: light weight, stretchability, tunable material properties, etc. These features, along with their diverse functions including actuation, sensing and insulation have made them a popular class of materials, with practical applications in tissue engineering, bio-inspired electronics, energy harvesting and storage, and biomimetics. From a mechanics perspective, biological tissues are also considered soft materials. With such ubiquity of these materials, our ability to understand and predict their mechanical behavior is not only critical for the design and development of soft materials in their synthetic applications, but is also vital for the prevention of pathologies that occur when tissues undergo mechanical trauma.

 

Our research program aims to develop cutting-edge experimental and computational tools to understand the mechanics of soft materials, with a special focus on the mechanical behavior under extreme strain rates and temperatures.