Programme

Programme with information about the venue and rooms will be published here later.

Program committee

Devin Roach

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Oregon State University (OSU), USA. Dr. Roach’s research interests focus on application of artificial intelligence to rapidly develop AM approaches for diverse classes of materials including thermosets, soils, or metals. He is also interested in the development and manufacturing of smart/active materials such as shape memory polymers (SMP) and liquid crystal elastomers (LCE) for applications in biomedical devices, soft robotics, and energy harvesting devices.

Morgan Barnes

Morgan Barnes
University College London, UK. Barnes’ work spans chemistry, mechanics, and manufacturing to develop responsive shape-shifting polymers for applications in soft-robotics, biomedical devices, and microfluidics. She combines theory and experiment for the quantitative design of smart materials including switchable biomimetic instabilities and strong soft-robotic grippers.

Jiu-an Lv

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Westlake University, China. Research interest focuses on photodeformable liquid crystal polymer materials and their application in functional devices. The research directions include but are not limited to the following: 1) Design and preparation of novel deformable liquid crystal polymer materials; 2) Design and fabrication of flexible smart device; 3) Development and application of novel optomicrofluidics technologies.

Mingchao Zhang

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Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Germany. Research focus is on stimuli-responsive liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) capable of reversible and programmable shape morphing and capable of stiffness programming, which make them promising smart, soft and active small-scale robot materials. He develops micro-scale LCE structures with programmable 3D geometries and 3D director fields, which enabled versatile shape morphing of soft machines.

Tayler S. Hebner

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Purdue University, Indiana, USA. In the Hebner Lab, they develop synthetic soft matter systems with stimuli-responsiveness to replicate dynamic, responsive, adaptive behavior of live matters. Using a combination of polymer physics, chemistry, and biology, they focus on understanding the underlying principles of these dynamic systems and building a toolbox for the design of responsive polymers, leading to innovation in such applications as soft robotics, medical devices, and tissue engineering – all of which share a common goal of mimicking or regulating biological function.

Hamed Shahsavan

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Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Among his research interests are smart polymers, liquid crystal elastomers, soft robotic materials, micro additive manufacturing, 4D printing, surface and interfacial engineering.