The Li Lab
The Grand Challenge
Our research focuses on designing and synthesizing next-generation soft matter systems – materials that go beyond static properties to exhibit adaptive behavior. We use “adaptive” to describe systems that can receive and process information from their environment, reorganize their structure, and precisely alter their properties in response.
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While adaptation is observed in biological systems, the principles and mechanisms required to achieve this behavior in synthetic systems remain poorly understood. Our work seeks to uncover these principles through a three-prong approach: the design and synthesis of material structure, the correlation between structure and property, and the investigation of interplay between components within a system.
Core Research Activities
We will use organic synthesis as a tool to design and synthesize hierarchically structured materials from building blocks such as macrocycles, polymers, and nanomaterials. By integrating organic synthesis with strategies such as self-assembly, and materials processing techniques, we will be able to control the structural features of a material at different length scales.
We will investigate material properties to understand how structure shapes function thereby gaining insights that will guide the development of principles needed to achieve adaptive behavior. Applications of interest include separation / adsorption (of pollutants), organic electronics, and sensing, which will provide practical use-cases and testing grounds to examine and refine these structure-property relationships
We will explore how different component within a system work together to produce behaviors that individual parts cannot achieve alone. Rather than focusing on isolated elements, we consider how the interplay between components (operating potentially at different length scales and time scales) can be harnessed to achieve emergent properties through collective dynamics.