41st CEMS Colloquium

Speaker

Dr. Yasuhiro Ishida (Team Leader, Emergent Bioinspired Soft Matter Research Team, RIKEN CEMS)

Date

17:30 - 18:30, July 27, 2016 (Wednesday)

Venue

Okochi-Hall, RIKEN

Title

Bioinspired soft materials

Abstract

Nature’s evolution has led to the introduction of highly efficient biological mechanisms. Imitating these mechanisms offers an enormous potential for the development of functional soft materials that may improve our day to day life. As represented by muscular tissues, some biological tissues are composed of numerous nanoscopic subunits that are assembled into anisotropically oriented structures extending over a macroscopic size regime. Such hierarchical structures are the origin of the superb biological functions, and their reproduction in artificial systems is a great challenge. To address to challenge, we have recently developed polymer networks with ‘single-crystal-like’ structural order, where various kinds of 1D and 2D-shaped nanoobjects were employed as constituents. Their unprecedented functions originating from anisotropic structures will be discussed in this presentation.