The UChicago MRSEC establishes new conceptual frameworks to guide materials discovery and explores synergistic connections. The research activities are organized into two Interdisciplinary Research Groups (IRGs) and one SuperSeed. The IRG on Trainable Soft Materials establishes a framework for building classes of materials whose physical response is engineered by using external manipulation to train in novel functionality. It takes inspiration from the fundamental processes that govern the structure and enormous adaptability of biological networks in order to derive new principles for pluripotent material fabrication by varying the training protocol. The IRG on Activated Architectured Materials constructs materials with spatiotemporally programmable and self-regulating transport properties by bringing together recent advances in active materials with inorganic colloidal and thin film synthesis. This work enables dynamic control of transport properties of inorganic materials with potential applications in sensing, actuation and biodesign. A Super-Seed on Materials for Electrical-Optical Quantum Transduction focuses on the challenge of creating integrated quantum circuits with coherent interfaces between different quantum materials spanning across many energy scales.
