New Bio-inspired Materials: When Biology Meets Chemistry, Physics, Engineering, and Design

Living systems sense, respond to, and harvest energy from the changing environment by interweaving chemistry, mechanics, optics, and fluid dynamics across time and length scales. In this lecture, materials scientist Joanna Aizenberg gives a taste of how inspiration from nature teaches us to break barriers between these fields in the synthetic realm and leads to fascinating new concepts in materials design. She looks at a deep-sea sponge and envisions a green, illuminated skyscraper that harvests energy from the wind. The brittle star’s intricate skeleton inspires dynamic optical systems that can collect light. She presents cilia-inspired adaptive hairy surfaces that alter their wetting, optical, and adhesive behavior via reconfiguration of tiny nanostructures. Creating liquid-sensing “noses” from chemically patterned photonic crystals inspired by butterflies, or ultra-slippery, antifouling surfaces with self-tuning transparency inspired by pitcher plant and cacti are just the beginning of the multifunctional, dynamic materials possibilities waiting to be explored at the intersection of biology, engineering, chemistry, and physics.