Welcome! This website is intended to share the results of my research related to the chemical engineering and material science of polymers and molecular interfaces. I am currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Bao Group in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University, where I am investigating organic electronic materials & devices.
News
Winter 2024
Our research was highlighted in a Nature outlook article: “Robot repair thyself: laying the foundation for self-healing machines” about how advances in materials science and sensing may bring about robots that can feel damage and mend themselves.
Summer 2023
My first paper in the Bao Group, co-led by Chris Cooper, describes a new strategy to improve the self-healing efficacy of multilayered soft electronics using immiscible but adhesive dynamic polymer networks. We discovered that when multilayered structures of these polymers are damaged and misaligned, they are capable of autnomously re-aligning during the healing process. Our experiments and simulations suggest that this phenomena is the result of diffusion-mediated minimization of the interfacial free energy, and that it can be generalized to other pairs of polymers and functional composite systems. We believe that this breakthrough will open the door for entirely new applications of self-healing materials for life-like soft robotic systems. Our article has been published in Science, and has been covered by 37 public news outlets including NSF Discoveries, Cosmos, Daily Mail, and EurekaAlert!
Fall 2021
An article in Current Science Daily about our recent paper in Cell Reports Physical Science describing the design of bio-inspired soft robotic mechanisms for gripping, catching, and conveying using the inversion of a toroidal elastic tube under fluidic pressure (commercially available as a children’s toy called a ‘water wiggly’), and an interview with my mentor, Professor George Whitesides, where he discusses the benefits of looking to biology for inspiration in curiosity-driven research.
A cool video describing our recent paper in ACS Central Science, led by Dr. Amit Nagarkar, where we demonstrated a strategy for storing digital information by ink jet printing fluorescent molecules with optically distinguishable emission.
Press coverage by Chemical & Engineering News
Summer 2021
A bittersweet goodbye to the Whitesides Group and the Northeast, as I start a new postdoc position in the Bao Group on the West Coast!
