Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers (MRSEC) UPENN

NON-TECHNICAL ABSTRACT

The Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter (LRSM) at the University of Pennsylvania is a center of excellence for materials research and education. It facilitates collaboration between researchers from different disciplines – physics, chemistry, engineering, and biology – to advance transformative scientific projects and solve societal challenges.

One research effort takes inspiration from the brain’s ability to learn, designing new materials that can adapt to their surroundings and complex stimuli. Potential applications range from making flexible materials that can deflect the energy of a hammer blow to creating soft robots that can perform complex tasks. These advances will result in the design of new materials with properties not found in naturally occurring systems, enabling entirely new technologies.

A second research effort takes advantage of how materials naturally separate into distinct phases like oil and water. The research team leverages the physics of demixing to manipulate the assembly of proteins, cells, and other soft materials to engineer living matter. Potential applications include new avenues for partitioning and controlled release of key molecules inside cells, akin to drug delivery, and creating new tissue-like materials, thereby significantly advancing synthetic biology, biotechnology, and medicine.

The LRSM educates and inspires the next generation of materials scientists and engineers, broadening participation in the materials research enterprise. The LRSM offers programs and activities for students at all levels, from elementary school to graduate school, and provides professional training at the post-doctoral level. These activities include summer camps and workshops that introduce students to the exciting world of materials science through hands-on experiments and demonstrations, research opportunities and mentorship that allows students to participate in scientific projects and learn from experts in the field, and outreach events and online resources that highlight the diversity and impact of materials science to the broader public.

The LRSM also provides access to state-of-the-art facilities and equipment for materials research, allowing researchers at Penn, regional and national universities, government laboratories, and industries to advance their own research activities. TECHNICAL ABSTRACT

IRG-1: Learning Metamaterials (NSF Big Ideas: Understanding the Rules of Life, Harnessing the Data Revolution) develops and exploits learning strategies that mimic how the brain uses local rules to change its structure to create and destroy synapses for distributed and robust learning. The research team advances and applies local adaptive learning to create novel microfluidic metamaterials and soft robots, understand how biopolymer networks function in vivo, and develop mechanical metamaterials with functional and complex deformation and stress redistribution behavior.

Research activity also advances the theory of learning by exploring new learning strategies that capitalize on the role of dynamics and non-linearities. IRG-2: Bioinspired Engineering of Condensed Protein Mesophases and Cell Collectives (NSF Big Ideas: Understanding the Rules of Life) discovers Rules of Life for condensed mesophases composed of polypeptide or cellular building blocks and uses these principles to engineer the structure and dynamics of synthetic biomaterials over micron to centimeter length scales.

The research team understands and utilizes phase partitioning to create structural organization over multiple length scales in living matter, including how macromolecules can be segregated into biochemical compartments in cells and how cells can segregate from one another in tissues. LRSM is a national leader in developing a competitive and diverse science and engineering workforce in demand by academia, government, and industry.

It provides a wide range of education, outreach, and human resource development programs that target people at all levels, with emphasis on underrepresented minorities, women, persons with disabilities, and first-generation/low-income students, from K-16 to Ph.D. students, post-docs, teachers, scientists in academia, industry, & government, and the general public. LRSM will curate and share its research, education, and outreach data.

In addition, the LRSM provides unique interdisciplinary training for doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers in critical fields for US technological competitiveness. It develops and facilitates the use of unique scientific experimental facilities by the local, regional, and national scientific community. The discoveries and understanding generated by the IRGs & Seeds will provide fundamentally new ways to harness active learning to build novel metamaterials and will exploit the thermodynamics and kinetics of phase partitioning to synthesize biomaterials with unprecedented control.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.