A reception with light refreshments will be held in the B10 lobby before each seminar from 1-1:30 p.m.

Resolving Trade-offs in Soft Materials: A Toolbox for Toughness, Transparency, and Transience

Xinyue Liu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at Michigan State University. She received her Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2021, and her bachelor’s degree from Sichuan University in 2015. Her research group currently focuses on hydrogel materials and devices as the new paradigm to control mass transport and light transmission for biomedical and environmental applications. She was awarded Forbes Asia 30 Under 30, MRS Graduate Student Award, and Emerging Investigator in
JMCB.

Designing soft materials is often a balancing act: when we make a material tougher, we usually sacrifice other properties that are equally important. For example, tough materials tend to scatter light and lose transparency, or resist breakdown and become environmentally persistent. These trade-offs are not just academic curiosities, but they limit progress in healthcare and sustainability technologies. In this talk, I will share our efforts to rethink this challenge by building a toolbox that links molecular design, network topology, and multiscale structures in polymers. Using this approach, we have
developed materials that are simultaneously tough and transparent for optical applications, as well as materials that are tough yet still programmable to degrade on demand. Beyond these case studies, I will show how this materials-by-design strategy opens a pathway to multifunctional soft matter systems that can adapt to biological environments, assist in sustainable manufacturing, and enable next-generation medical and environmental
technologies.