In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Nancy Sottos, the Maybelle Leland Swanlund Endowed Chair and head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois–Urbana Champaign (UIUC), and Justine Paul, a former student at UIUC who now holds a position at DuPont, about their work with frontal pol…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Reza Moini of Princeton University about his group’s development of an enhanced additive manufacturing technique to fabricate cementitious materials with excellent fracture toughness. They based their design of the material on the double-helical or double-bouligand structure of coelacant…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews postdoctoral research fellow Rohit Pratyush Behera and Prof. Hortense Le Ferrand of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore about their design of a strong and tough ceramic that absorbs energy, inspired from biology. They borrowed microscopic designs found in a mollusk, a mantis s…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Yen-Hung Lin of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology about his work to eliminate defects in perovskite solar cells. Lin’s group treated the perovskites with a category of molecules known as amino-silanes, which bind vacancies in the perovskites, preventing recombination of the…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Michael Pettes, deputy group leader and staff scientist at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies in Los Alamos National laboratory about a characterization technique that employs a four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscope (4D-STEM) paired with complex computational…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Michael Dickey of North Carolina State University about the discovery and mechanical properties of glassy gels. Dicky credits his postdoc Meixiang Wang who, while studying ionic liquids, created the first glassy gel. Dicky’s group found that the mechanical properties of their glassy gel…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Coskun Kocabas from The University of Manchester in the UK about his development of a metamaterial that can tailor thermal emission. Rather than using a periodic system, which most topological materials employ, his research team borrowed a concept from laser design and created an optical…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Rasmus Neilsen from the Technical University of Denmark about his fabrication of a monolithic selenium/silicon tandem solar cell. The selenium forms the top cell of the tandem device, with silicon used as the bottom cell. Selenium-based single-junction solar cells have traditionally used…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Mihir Pendharkar of Stanford University about characterizing electronic properties of twistronics materials. Twistronics refers to a type of electronic device consisting of two-dimensional materials layered at a relative twist angle, forming a new periodic structure known as moiré super…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Falon Kalutantirige from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Ying Li from the University of Wisconsin-Madison about their approach and discovery when characterizing nanovoids in polymer films. Using polyamide (PA) membranes as their subject of study, the researchers applied g…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Alexandre Dmitriev from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden about his group’s computational model of a three-dimensional metamaterial exhibiting a magnetoelectric effect—known as the Tellegen effect—when exposed to light. The building blocks of the metamaterial are comprised of disks of…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Antonio Dominguez-Alfaro from the University of Cambridge, UK about the development of a single-step manufacturing approach for a multimaterial 3D-printing method. The research team created two inks. One ink is a polymeric deep eutectic solvent – polyDES – made by combining and heating t…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Elizabeth Wilson interviews postdoctoral researcher M. Iqbal Bakti Utama of Northwestern University about a method allowing single photon production without defect. Aryl diazonium chemistry has been used in the past to functionalize the surface of carbon nanotubes. Utama’s group found that this chemistry also…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Irmgard Bischofberger of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology about her investigation of how chirality emerges in nature. She uses liquid crystal molecules of disodium chromoglycate in her studies. When the molecules are dissolved in water, they form linear rods. The research group…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Eric Pop, Xiangjin Wu, and Asir Intisar Khan from Stanford University about their work building a phase-change memory superlattice at the nanoscale. They created the superlattice by alternating layers of antimony-tellurium nanoclusters with a nanocomposite made from germanium, antimony, …

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Magalí Lingenfelder from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland about her group’s discovery of the switching mechanism behind H-bond-linked two-dimensional networks. The hydrogen bonding ability was tuned by comparing carboxylates to aldehydes. Lingenfelder’s group fou…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Aram Amassian from North Carolina State University about his group’s achievements using RoboMapper, a materials acceleration platform. In researchers’ quest to run environmentally-conscious laboratories, Amassian offers a solution that focuses on characterization of materials. Having fou…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Kaveh Ahadi from The Ohio State University about a material his group developed that maintains superconductivity in a magnetic field. The researchers grew a film of lanthanum manganite on a crystal of potassium tantalate. When lowered to the temperature of 2 Kelvin, the material is a su…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Elizabeth Wilson interviews Manos Mavrikakis from the University of Wisconsin–Madison about his group’s theoretical work on real-world industrial catalytic conditions. It is often assumed that most catalyst surface atoms stay in place during a reaction, firmly bonded to their metal neighbors. However, Mavrika…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Nathan Gabor from the University of California, Riverside about his group’s work on imaging and directing the flow of electrons in electronic devices. They designed their device by taking a crystal of yttrium iron garnet, which does not conduct electricity, and putting a nanometers-thic…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Rahul Rao interviews Fereshte Ghahari of George Mason University about the use of a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to measure the electronic and magnetic properties of moiré quantum materials. Ghahari and collaborators twisted two layers of graphene at a specific angle, then chilled the material to suppr…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Hamideh Khanbareh and Vlad Jarkov of the University of Bath in the UK about an application they introduced for using piezoelectric materials in tissue engineering. The researchers fabricated a composite by combining polydimethylsiloxane with a piezoelectric material of potassium-sodium-n…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Professor Jerry Qi and postdoctoral researcher Mingzhe Li of the Georgia Institute of Technology about their new technique to 3D print silica glass. After using two-photon polymerization to cross-link poly-dimethylsiloxane, Qi’s research team used deep UV to convert the polymer into sili…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Surabhi Madhvapathy of Northwestern University about an implantable bioelectronics system that can perform early detection of kidney transplant rejection in rats. Madhvapathy and her colleagues have developed a wireless sensor that attaches to the kidney itself. The biosensor measures t…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Kento Katagiri, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, about the propagation speed of dislocations in materials. Using an X-ray free electron laser to collect data from single-crystal diamond, Katagiri and colleagues have determined the velocity of wave propagation to be in the t…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Stanford University’s Jennifer Dionne and her PhD student Fareeha Safir and their colleague Amr. Saleh from Cairo University about their work on identifying bacteria in complex samples. Instead of culturing bacteria then identifying them using specific methods such as a polymerase chain …

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Alice Soragni of the University of California, Los Angeles about her work in precision oncology. Rather than sequence the DNA of a patient’s tumor, Soragni uses bioprinting to create organoids from the patient’s cells. She then adds various drugs to the cells to directly test their resp…

While thermodynamics suggests that water sorption is more favorable at a low temperature, MRS Bulletin podcaster Laura Leay interviews post-doctoral researcher Xinyue Liu from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who reports a hydrogel that can adsorb more water at elevated temperatures. Liu and the research team from MIT and the Univers…

Many industrial processes require heat or create it as a by-product. Now, Takayoshi Katase from the Tokyo Institute of Technology has found a way to harness this heat in an eco-friendly way, as he explains in an interview with MRS Bulletin podcaster Laura Leay. One way to harness this heat is to use thermoelectric devices to produce electricity via…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Xuchen Wang of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany about his work on photonic time crystals. While conventional crystals are composed of repeating unit cells in space, such as eight carbon atoms arranged in a cube to form a diamond, a photonic time crystal has a structure that …

Little research has been done on the magnetic properties of high-entropy oxides, a challenge taken up by Alannah Hallas at the University of British Columbia in Canada, interviewed by MRS Bulletin podcaster Laura Leay. Hallas’s research group began by choosing five elements that would be magnetic and combining them in oxide form, rendering a spinel…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Widi Moestopo, a former graduate student in Julia Greer’s laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and now a postdoc at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory about their work incorporating microknots in architected materials. Using two-photon lithography, Moestopo…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Dominic Bresser from the Helmholtz Institute Ulm and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany about the suitability of a nanotwinned copper foil as a current collector for the negative electrode in“zero excess” lithium−metal batteries. The nanotwinned copper foil has an essential…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Carmel Majidi from Carnegie Mellon University about an adaptive-responsive soft micro-robot. The key is eliciting a liquid–solid phase transition through electromagnetic induction. In addition to using the magnetic field to induce the phase change, it can also be used to make the machine…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Prof. Esma Ismailova and graduate student Marina Galliani from Mines Saint-Etienne about their work toward creating biocompatible, eco-friendly materials for wearable electronics. For this particular project, they developed a conducting material based on a commercial polymer known as PE…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Rob Shepherd from Cornell University about an adaptive-responsive self-healing soft robotic system. Shepherd’s research team has developed waveguides made of self-healing polyurethane urea crosslinked with aromatic sulfide bonds. When this material is cut, relatively weak hydrogen bonds …

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Jiahui Li, a graduate student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign about designing structures out of gold nanoparticles. When the nanoparticle structure takes the shape of a pinwheel, different types of light interact with the structure differently due to its chirality. Differ…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Robert Hovden from the University of Michigan and his graduate student Jonathan Schwartz on development of the freely available Tomviz platform (tomviz.org) that enables real-time three-dimensional (3D) visual analysis of materials. Building on the already existing Tomviz platform, Schwa…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Tao Yang from the City University of Hong Kong in China who focuses on the innovative design of advanced structural materials. In the area of high-strength alloys, Yang’s research team looked specifically at how to stabilize nanoparticles at high temperatures. In an alloy of Ni59.9-xCoxF…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Stephen Riffle interviews Alessandra Scagliarini, a professor of infectious disease at the University of Bologna, and Beatrice Fraboni, a professor of physics at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Bologna, about their electrical transistor assay that quantifies SARS-CoV-2 for antibod…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Murat Onen, a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, about analog deep learning that could help lower the cost of training artificial intelligence (AI). The programmable analog device stores information in the same place where the information is processed.…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Monica Olvera de la Cruz of Northwestern University and her colleagues who gained insight into biochirality. By analyzing self-assembly for a series of amphiphiles, Cn-K, consisting of an ionizable amino acid [lysine (K)] coupled to alkyl tails with n = 12, 14, or 16 carbons, the researc…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Peter Gumbsch, who is affiliated with both the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and the Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials in Germany about gear-based mechanical metamaterials. The researchers offer a paradigm shift in design where—instead of choosing a material for a given…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Sergey Artyukhin from the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia and Louis Ponet, who is affiliated with both the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia and Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa about a topologically protected switching phenomena in ferroic materials. When a multiferroic crystal (GdMn2O5) …

Victor A. Rodriguez-Toro, a researcher in materials and devices and a science correspondent for MRS Bulletin, interviews Ayse Turak, Associate Professor of Engineering Physics and Director of the Centre for Emerging Device Technologies at McMaster University in Canada, about her group’s research in organic optoelectronics. Turak focuses her researc…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Bin Ouyang of Florida State University about making a better cathode for lithium ion batteries. The current use of cobalt and nickel in their cathodes causes Li-ion batteries to contract in volume and degrade. Ouyang and his colleagues simulated and then fabricated new cathode materials…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews graduate student John Ahrens of Harvard University about challenges in bioprinting heart tissue. One challenge in particular is aligning the cells. Heart cells are narrow and rectangular in shape. In a natural heart, they line up in parallel to form aligned filaments. Those aligned fila…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Laura Rossi from Delft University of Technology (the Netherlands) and Greg van Anders from the University of Michigan (USA) and Queen’s University (Canada) about advances they’ve made in colloidal preassembly in order to gain control in materials structure at a range of length scales. Th…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Adam Kubec at Swiss startup XRNanotech and research team member Marie-Christine Zdora of the Paul Scherrer Institut about their proof-of-principle of an x-ray achromatic lens. The lens consist of a focusing diffractive and a defocusing refractive optical element that achieves imaging of…

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Stephen Riffle interviews Jennifer Gelinas, an assistant professor in the Department of Neurology and Institute for Genomic Medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and Dion Khodagholy, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University, about their ionic c…