IMX Colloquium - Soft Electronics: Multimaterial Innovations for Wearable and Biomedical Devices

Soft materials assemblies offer a diverse range of sophisticated functions, including sensing and actuation, particularly relevant in intimate interactions with the human body. While hard materials dominate current machine and robot construction, there is a growing recognition of the advantages of soft devices in biomedical applications and human-machine interfaces. Soft systems offer comfort, safety, adaptability, and cost-effectiveness. However, the development of soft electronic devices, encompassing sensors, actuators, and power sources, is in its early stages, requiring further research in materials, fabrication, design, mechanism, and control.

In this talk, I will discuss soft multimaterial devices, first focusing on a specific geometry: fibers. I will introduce our novel and scalable fiber manufacturing strategy, multi-material thermal drawing, which relies on understanding and control of viscous flow. I will show how combining fundamental understanding and engineering of rheology, mechanical and electrical engineering lead to significant advances in the range of materials, architectures and functionalities achieved for multi-material electronic fibers. Additionally, I will discuss our pioneering integration of soft robotic actuators and flexible bioelectronics for advanced neural interfaces. Specifically, I will highlight the design of highly conformable nerve cuffs capable of extensive and reprogrammable shape morphing, which provides a path toward minimally invasive neurosurgery and intimate, high-quality nerve interface.

Bio: Dr. Chaoqun Dong is a Marie Curie fellow at the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge. She will be joining Columbia University in July this year as a tenure-track assistant professor in Mechanical Engineering. She received her Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from EPFL in 2021. Her PhD research in Prof. Fabien Sorin’s group focused on design, scalable fabrication and application study of soft electronic multimaterial fibers and textiles. Following the award of the Swiss NSF Early-postdoc Fellowship, she conducted postdoctoral research at Cambridge on electrochemically actuated microelectrodes. Dr. Dong has authored 35 peer-reviewed papers published in top-tier journals, accumulating over 2400 citations. Her research interests lie in multidisciplinary engineering programs, with a primary focus on the design, fabrication, and application of soft functional materials and bioelectronic devices.