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We are a Soft Matter group in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at UIUC. Our work is driven by fundamental questions about how materials and structures form, adapt, and acquire function, but with engineering applications in mind. We develop and use theoretical, computational, and experimental tools to understand how simple component-level interactions and properties give rise to useful, system-level behavior, and how these principles can be leveraged to design new materials and architectures. A central theme of our research is directed emergence: how complex, functional structures can emerge from local interactions rather than from a predefined blueprint. Inspired by biological systems and grounded in mechanics and physics, we ask questions such as:

• How do social insects build stable, functional structures using only local information?
• How can we design or tune local interactions between building blocks (e.g., particles, fibers, or agents) to control the global behavior of a material system?
• How do boundary conditions, environmental inputs, and constraints influence the shapes, functions, and overall properties that emerge in a material system?