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. 

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

• 7/2024 Prof Jin delivered an invited talk in Annual Meeting and Exhibition of American Association of Physicists in Medicine.

• 5/2024 Congratulate Yu for successfully defending his thesis!

• 5/2024 Congratulate Weixuan, Jonathan and Natee for passing their qualifying exam.

• 5/2024 Yu, Chen, and Prof Jin presented in AmeriMech Symposium on Fracture of Soft Materials.

• 4/2024 Congratulate Jonathan for winning the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP)!

• 4/2024 Boliang presented in 7th IEEE – RAS International Conference on Soft Robotics, Robosoft 2024 workshop.

• 3/2024 Prof Jin delivered a keynote talk in Euromech Colloquium 630 (Nonlinear Elasticity: Modelling of multi-physics and applications).

• 1/2024 Yu and Shivam presented in Gordon Research Conference on Multifunctional Materials and Structures.

• 11/2023 Prof Jin is featured as an Emerging Investigator in Soft Matter.

• 10/2023 Shivam, Boliang, Yu and Chen presented in 2023 Annual Technology Meeting of Society of Engineering Science.

• 10/2023 Prof Jin presented a plenary talk in Henkel North American Scientific Symposium of Adhesive Technologies Meeting.

• 9/2023 Marwan, Boliang and Chen presented in SoCal Solids 2023.

• 9/2023 Welcome our new PhD students, Weixuan, Jonathan and Natee!

• 8/2023 Our undergraduate students present their posters in Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) poster symposium. Congratulate Alex for the honorable mention for his technical presentation, and congratulate Richard for the honorable mention for his poster! 

• '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 

• 'Highly stretchable metallization based on metal-polymer intermixing for skin-inspired organic transistors' published in Science Advances

• 'Photo-induced spatiotemporal bending of shape memory polymer beams' published in Smart Materials and Structures

• 'Buckling and postbuckling of thick tubes' published in Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids 

• 'Buckling of viscoelastic spherical shells' published in Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids

• 'Matrix stiffness influences tubular formation in renal tissue engineering' published in Applied Sciences

• 'Mechanics underpinning phase separation in hydrogels' published in Macromolecules 

• 'Tough interface-enabled stretchable electronics using non-stretchable polymer semiconductors and conductors' published in Nature Nanotechnology