Complex Biosystems Seminar Series
October 9, 2025, 4:00-5:00pm, Beadle N172 Zoom: https://unl.zoom.us/j/93813607954
Presenter: Dr. Stephen Morin
Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry, UNL Fellow of the National Strategic Research Institute
“Microgels for soft actuators, bioinks, and color/pattern morphing skins”
We are investigating new strategies for the design, manufacture, and operation of autonomous (i.e., adaptive and stimuli-responsive) materials comprised of soft polymers with functional (chemical, optical, mechanical, etc.) properties. These strategies emphasize hierarchical materials integration which can overcome operational constraints by balancing the size, geometry, and connectivity of individual active elements across multiple length scales. This talk will focus on our recent work in the fabrication of microstructured hydrogel arrays for applications in microactuation, optofluidics, and dynamic coloration.
Hydrogels are functional polymeric materials with stimuli-responsive properties applicable to a wide range of applications including soft electronics and robotics, three-dimensional cell culture, tissue engineering, and optofluidics. Accordingly, the diversity and reported use cases of these materials has grown tremendously over the past decades, however, the fabrication and device integration of multi-material, hydrogel microstructures remain a challenge. I will describe simple microfabrication strategies that enable the facile production of fixed arrays of stimuli-responsive hydrogel microstructures with dynamic microactation functionality. Our approach uses rationally designed soft, stretchable chemical templates and stamps to (i) form prepolymer droplets into ordered arrays of microshapes and (ii) provide surface chemical moieties to photograft the hydrogels directly to the support during crosslinking. By executing this procedure, we realized a seamless fabrication scheme applicable to the production of a diversity (in terms of materials and geometries) of functional microgel-based structures. To demonstrate the utility of our approach and the stability of the fixed microgel arrays in liquid phase applications, I will present prototypical microgel-based devices with stimuli-responsive (e.g., solvothermal and chemical) optofluidic and microactuation functionality. Further, I will demonstrate how microactuation can be applied to color and pattern morphing materials. We envision many technologies, for example, liquid phase soft microactuators, stimuli-responsive 3D cell culture platforms, micro/optofluidic chips, stretchable displays, and dynamic print media, that will directly benefit from the described fabrication strategies and the demonstrated microgel networks.
More details at: https://unl.zoom.us/j/93813607954