Megan Valentine (UC Santa Barbara)
Making light work in photoresponsive materials
Micro-structured materials are ubiquitous in biological systems, where they impart superior mechanical properties including high toughness and strength, and many biomaterials are naturally stimuli responsive. Yet understanding how to controllably formulate and optimize such multiphase, hierarchical and adaptive materials remains challenging. In this talk, I will present my group’s recent work on developing new methods for the design, manufacture, and mechanical analysis of photoresponsive material systems, ranging from the on-demand manufacture of lightweight polymer composites to self-regulating actuators for use in soft robotics.
Bio :
Megan T. Valentine is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Co-Director of the California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her interdisciplinary research group investigates many aspects of biological and bioinspired materials, with an emphasis on understanding how forces are generated and transmitted in living materials, how these forces control cellular outcomes, and how the extraordinary features of living systems can be captured in manmade materials. This highly interdisciplinary experimental work lies at the intersection of engineering, physics, biology and chemistry, and advances diverse application areas, ranging from marine-inspired materials to mechanobiology to soft robotics. Megan received her B.S from Lehigh University, M.S. from UPenn and Ph.D. from Harvard, all in Physics. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford in the Department of Biological Sciences, where she was the recipient of a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Postdoctoral Fellowship, and a Burroughs Wellcome Career Award at the Scientific Interface. In 2008, she joined the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she now serves as a co-leader of an IRG on Resilient Multiphase Soft Materials within the UC Santa Barbara Materials Research Laboratory, an NSF MRSEC. She was awarded an NSF CAREER Award for her work on neuron mechanics, and a Fulbright to study adhesion mechanics in Paris, France. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.