Mechanics of Soft Materials Lab

Soft materials are capable of large deformation, and have mechanical properties comparable to those of biological tissues. Recent developments in soft materials are enabling the rise of soft robotics, stretchable electronics, and biomechatronics. These new fields are profoundly altering the interactions between human beings and machines. Through the integration of analytical modeling, computational simulations and experiments, our group aims to investigate the fundamental physics and mechanics of soft materials, such as their constitutive relation, nonlinear deformation, instability, and fracture. On the other hand, our group strives to develop new materials, structures, and functions for soft robotics, stretchable electronics, and mechanical metamaterials. 

• 6/2025 Congratulate Chen for getting the PhD degree, Jonathan, Weixuan, Benny and Ursa for getting the MS degree, and Swetha and Jasmine for getting the BS degree! 

• 6/2025 Congratulate Ursa for passing her preliminary exam!

• 6/2025 Congratulate Shivam for winning the Dissertation Year Award!

• 5/2025 Prof Jin delivered an invited talk at Georgia Institute of Technology.

• 5/2025 Prof Jin delivered an invited talk in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

• 5/2025 Prof Jin delivered an invited talk at California Institute of Technology.

• 4/2025 Prof Jin delivered an invited talk at University of Southern California.

• 4/2025 Congratulate Weixuan for winning the Outstanding Mechanical MS Award, and Jonathan for winning the Outstanding Aerospace MS Award!

• 4/2025 Shivam and Prof Jin's paper 'Architected Lattices with a Topological Transition' was ranked as the 'Top viewed article' in Advanced Engineering Materials.

• 3/2025 Congratulate Weixuan for passing his qualifying exam.

• 3/2025 Shivam, Boliang, Marwan, and Weixuan presented in APS March Meeting.

• 2/2025 Congratulate Chen for successfully defending his thesis!

• 11/2024 Prof Jin delivered an invited talk in ASME 2024 International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition.

• 11/2024 Prof Jin received the 2025 Society of Engineering Huajian Gao Young Investigator Medal! 

• 8/2024 Our undergraduate students, Collin Shiang and Jasmine Chen, present their posters in Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) poster symposium.

• 'A printed microscopic universal gradient interface for super stretchable strain-insensitive bioelectronics' published in Advanced Materials.

• ‘Heterogeneous subdomain strain localization for tailored behaviors in smart hydrogels’ published in Nature Communications.

• ‘Constitutive and fracture behavior of double-network elastomers’ published in Advanced Engineering Materials.

• 'A modified semi-soft model of liquid crystal elastomers: application to elastic and viscoelastic responses' published in Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids.

• ‘Haptic artificial muscle skin for extended reality’ published in Science Advances.

• 'Rate-dependent and delayed snap-through behaviors of viscoelastic metamaterials' published in International Journal of Mechanical Sciences.

• 'Architected lattices with a topological transition' published in Advanced Engineering Materials

• 'Exceptional stress-director coupling at the crack tip of a liquid crystal elastomer' published in Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids

• 'Focal strain-driven rapid, sustainable, and scalable isolation of functional layers for bioelectronics and robotics' published in Nature Sustainability

• 'Achieving tissue-level softness on stretchable electronics through a generalizable soft interlayer design' published in Nature Communications

• 'Rate-dependent stress-order coupling in main-chain liquid crystal elastomers' published in Soft Matter

• 'High-throughput printing of combinatorial materials from aerosols' published in Nature

• 'Pseudo-bistability of viscoelastic shells' published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A

• 'Editorial: Materials, design, modeling and control of soft robotic artificial muscles' published in Frontiers in Robotics and AI