Support for collaborative industrial research that moves advanced-materials innovations toward practical use. The competition covers three priority growth themes and one strategic opportunity theme. Eligible project grant requests range from £500,000 to £1 million. Applications close at 16:00 UK time on 28 October 2026.

High-quality glass lenses are commonplace in the design of optical instrumentation used across the biosciences. However, research-grade glass lenses are often costly, delicate and, depending on the prescription, can involve intricate and lengthy manufacturing - even more so in bioimaging applications. This seminar will outline 3D printing as a viable low-cost alternative for the manufacture of high-performance optical elements, where I will also discuss the creation of the world’s first fully 3D printed microscope and other implementations of 3D printed lenses. Our 3D printed lenses were generated using consumer-grade 3D printers and pose a 225x materials cost-saving compared to glass optics. Moreover, they can be produced in any lab or home environment and offer great potential for education and outreach. Following performance validation, our 3D printed optics were implemented in the production of a fully 3D printed microscope and demonstrated in histological imaging applications. We also applied low-cost fabrication methods to exotic lens geometries to enhance resolution and contrast across spatial scales and reveal new biological structures. Across these applications, our findings showed that 3D printed lenses are a viable substitute for commercial glass lenses, with the advantage of being relatively low-cost, accessible, and suitable for use in optical instruments. Combining 3D printed lenses with open-source 3D printed microscope chassis designs opens the doors for low-cost applications for rapid prototyping, low-resource field diagnostics, and the creation of cheap educational tools.

Biological materials gain complexity from the programmable nature of their components. To manufacture materials with comparable complexity synthetically, we need to create building blocks with low crosstalk so that they only bind to their desired partners. Canonically, these building blocks are made using DNA strands or proteins to achieve specificity. Here we propose a new materials platform, termed Magnetic Handshake Materials, in which we program interactions through designing magnetic dipole patterns. This is a completely synthetic platform, enabled by magnetic printing technology, which is easier to both model theoretically and control experimentally. In this seminar, I will give an overview of the development of the Magnetic Handshake Materials platform, ranging from interaction, assembly to function design.

Living organisms have mastered the dynamic control of stresses within sheets to induce shape transformation and locomotion. For instance, the spatiotemporal pattern of action potential in a heart yields a dynamical stress field leading to shape changes and biological function. Such structures inspired the development of theoretical tools and responsive materials alike. Yet, present attempts to mimic their rich dynamics and phenomenology in autonomous synthetic matter are still very limited. In this talk, I will present several complementing innovations toward this goal: novel shaping mechanisms that were overlooked by previous research, new fabrication techniques for programmable matter via 4D printing of gel structures, and most prominently, the first autonomous shape morphing membranes. The dynamical control over the geometry of the material is a prevalent theme in all of these achievements. In particular, the latter system demonstrates localized deformations, induced by a pattern-forming chemical reaction, that prescribe the patterns of curvature, leading to global shape evolution. Together, these developments present a route for modeling and producing fully autonomous soft membranes mimicking some of the locomotive capabilities of living organisms.

Nature is replete with extraordinary materials that can grow, move, respond, and adapt. In this talk I will describe our ongoing efforts to develop advanced polymeric materials, inspired by nature. First, I will describe my group’s efforts to develop ultrastiff, ultratough materials inspired by the byssal materials of marine mussels. These adhesive contacts allow mussels to secure themselves to rocks, wood, metals and other surfaces in the harsh conditions of the intertidal zone. By developing a foundational understanding of the structure-mechanics relationships and processing of the natural system, we can design high-performance materials that are extremely strong without compromising extensibility, as well as macroporous materials with tunable toughness and strength. In the second half of the talk, I will describe new efforts to exploit light as a means of remote control and power. By leveraging the phototransduction pathways of highly-absorbing, negatively photochromic molecules, we can drive the motion of amorphous polymeric materials as well as liquid flows. These innovations enable applications in packaging, connective tissue repair, soft robotics, and optofluidics.

Self-organized complex structures in nature, e.g., viral capsids, hierarchical biopolymers, and bacterial flagella, offer efficiency, adaptability, robustness, and multi-functionality. Can we program the self-assembly of three-dimensional (3D) complex structures using simple building blocks, and reach similar or higher level of sophistication in engineered materials? Here we present an analytic theory for the self-assembly of polyhedral nanoparticles (NPs) based on their crystal structures in non-Euclidean space. We show that the unavoidable geometrical frustration of these particle shapes, combined with competing attractive and repulsive interparticle interactions, lead to controllable self-assembly of structures of complex order. Applying this theory to tetrahedral NPs, we find high-yield and enantiopure self-assembly of helicoidal ribbons, exhibiting qualitative agreement with experimental observations. We expect that this theory will offer a general framework for the self-assembly of simple polyhedral building blocks into rich complex morphologies with new material capabilities such as tunable optical activity, essential for multiple emerging technologies.

Granular matter can serve as a prototype for exploring the rich physics of many-body systems driven far from equilibrium. This talk will outline a new direction for granular physics with macroscopic particles, where acoustic levitation compensates the forces due to gravity and eliminates frictional interactions with supporting surfaces in order to focus on particle interactions. Levitating small particles by intense ultrasound fields in air makes it possible to manipulate and control their positions and assemble them into larger aggregates. The small air viscosity implies that the regime of underdamped dynamics can be explored, where inertial effects are important, in contrast to typical colloids in a liquid, where inertia can be neglected. Sound scattered off individual, levitated solid particles gives rise to controllable attractive forces with neighboring particles. I will discuss some of the key concepts underlying acoustic levitation, describe how detuning an acoustic cavity can introduce active fluctuations that control the assembly statistics of small levitated particles clusters, and give examples of how interactions between neighboring levitated objects can be controlled by their shape.

Rigidity is the ability of a system to resist imposed stresses before ultimately undergoing failure. However, disordered materials often contain both rigid and floppy subregions that complicate the utility of taking system-wide averages. I will talk about 3 frameworks capable of connecting the internal structure of disordered materials to their rigidity and/or failure under loading, and describe how my collaborators and I have applied these frameworks to laboratory data on laser-cut lattices and idealized granular materials. These are, in order of increasing physics content: (1) centrality within an adjacency matrix describing its connectivity, (2) Maxwell constraint counting on the full network of frictional contact forces, and (3) the vibrational modes of a synthetic dynamical matrix (Hessian). The first two rely primarily on topology, and the second two contrast the utility of considering interparticle forces (Coulomb failure) vs. the energy landscape. All three methods, while successfully elucidating the origins of rigidity and brittle vs. ductile failure, also provide interesting counterpoints regarding how much information is enough to make predictions.

Magnetic fields exert controllable forces that generate microscopic actuation and locomotion in soft materials with superparamagnetic or ferromagnetic components. I will describe the shape changes and materials parameters required to drive and direct matter including filaments, membranes and hydrogels with magnetic components using precessing magnetic fields

Cement is the main binding agent in concrete, literally gluing together rocks and sand into the most-used synthetic material on Earth. However, cement production is responsible for significant amounts of man- made greenhouse gases—in fact if the cement industry were a country, it would be the third largest emitter in the world. Alternatives to the current, environmentally harmful cement production process are not available essentially because the gaps in fundamental understanding hamper the development of smarter and more sustainable solutions. The ultimate challenge is to link the chemical composition of cement grains to the nanoscale physics of the cohesive forces that emerge when mixing cement with water. Cement nanoscale cohesion originates from the electrostatics of ions accumulated in a water-based solution between like-charged surfaces but it is not captured by existing theories because of the nature of the ions involved and the high surface charges. Surprisingly enough, this is also the case for unexplained cohesion in a range of colloidal and biological matter. About one century after the early studies of cement hydration, we have quantitatively solved this notoriously hard problem and discovered how cement cohesion develops during hydration. I will discuss how 3D numerical simulations that feature a simple but molecular description of ions and water, together with an analytical theory that goes beyond the traditional continuum approximations, helped us demonstrate that the optimized interlocking of ion-water structures determine the net cohesive forces and their evolution. These findings open the path to scientifically grounded strategies of material design for cements and have implications for a much wider range of materials and systems where ionic water-based solutions feature both strong Coulombic and confinement effects, ranging from biological membranes to soils. Construction materials are central to our society and to our life as humans on this planet, but usually far removed from fundamental science. We can now start to understand how cement physical-chemistry determines performance, durability and sustainability.

The dream of programmable matter is to create materials whose physical properties (shape, moduli, response to perturbations, etc.) can be changed on the fly. For many years, my group has been thinking about how to program flat sheets that fold up into three dimensional shapes, most recently by exploiting the principles of origami design. Unfortunately, a combinatorial explosion of folding pathways makes robust folding particularly challenging. In this talk, I will discuss how this pluripotency arises from the topology of the configuration space. This suggests a broader understanding of a larger class of materials spanning from folding forms to spring networks to mechanical structures that perform computational logic.

Diversity in the natural world emerges from the collective behavior of large numbers of interacting objects. Statistical physics provides the framework relating microscopic to macroscopic properties. A fundamental assumption underlying this approach is that we have complete knowledge of the interactions between the microscopic entities. But what if that, even though possible in principle becomes impossible in practice ? Can we still construct a framework for describing their collective behavior ? Dense suspensions and granular materials are two often quoted examples where we face this challenge. These are systems where because of the complicated surface properties of particles there is extreme sensitivity of the interactions to particle positions. In this talk, I will present a perspective based on notions of constraint satisfaction that provides a way forward. I will focus on our recent work on the emergence of elasticity in the absence of any broken symmetry, and sketch out other problems that can be addressed using this perspective.

Colloidal dispersions of rod-like particles are widely accepted as convenient model systems to study the phase behavior of liquid-crystal forming systems, commonly found in LCDs. This is due to the fact that colloidal rods exhibit analogous phase behavior to that of elongated molecules, while they can be directly observed by optical microscopy. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the liquid crystalline behaviour of so-called bent-core, or banana-shaped, molecules. This is due to their ability to form exotic biaxial nematic phases such as the twist-bend and splay-bend nematic phase, which may be of particular interest inherent to their fast switching response in LCDs. Here, we develop model “banana-shaped” colloidal particles with tunable dimensions and curvature, whose structure and dynamics are accessible at the particle level. 
By heating initially straight rods made of SU-8 photoresist, we induce a controllable shape deformation that causes the rods to buckle into banana-shaped particles. We elucidate the phase behavior of differently curved colloidal bananas using confocal microscopy. Although highly curved bananas only form isotropic phases, less curved bananas exhibit very rich phase behavior, including biaxial nematic phases, polar and antipolar smectic-like phases, and even the long-predicted, elusive splay-bend nematic phase.