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When Allan H. MacDonald, a theoretical physicist at The University of Texas at Austin and a faculty investigator in UT Austin’s Center for Dynamics and Control of Materials, an NSF MRSEC, began exploring two-dimensional materials decades ago, the field was still taking shape. Today, that work has helped define an entirely new area of nanoscience — and earned him one of science’s major international honors.

Yishu Wang has been elected as one of three new general members to the SNS-HFIR User Group (SHUG) Executive Committee (EC) starting January 1, 2026. SHUG consists of all persons interested in using the neutron scattering facilities at Oak Ridge. It provides input to the management on user concerns, provides a forum for keeping the entire community informed of issues and progress at these facilities, and serves as an advocacy group for neutron scattering science at these facilities.

Penn MRSEC Seed researchers Mathijssen and Tao showed that the length of a swimming bacterium and the geometry of the porous environment around it jointly determine whether the cell traverses or becomes trapped, and used that coupling to propose a passive physical mechanism for sorting antimicrobial-resistant bacteria from drug-affected ones.

Penn MRSEC Seed researchers Vining and Purohit, with Radhakrishnan, showed that under large compressive strains characteristic of growing tumors, water flow through the porous extracellular matrix dominates stress relaxation, alters growth-factor transport, and reshapes how a tumor proliferates over physiological timescales.

Penn MRSEC researchers Stebe and Lee developed a 3D-printable ink that, after extrusion, spontaneously phase-separates into a bicontinuous oil-water emulsion stabilized by fumed silica nanoparticles, locking in two interpenetrating channels with sub-micron domains while the printed object holds an arbitrary centimeter-scale shape.

Penn MRSEC researchers Durian and Katifori built a network of custom bistable electronic elements whose pattern of edge voltages records the history of how the network was driven, inspired by the multistable flow behavior seen in plant vasculature.

Penn MRSEC researchers Good, Chenoweth, and Patel designed short disordered peptides that assemble into stable, gel-phase coacervate particles, loaded them with proteins of interest, and delivered them into living cells without any gene transfer, where the particles act as designer biochemical compartments that capture and degrade native target proteins.

The 13th Annual PREM Symposium took place in San Juan, PR and focused on artificial intelligence and autonomous experimentation. The day consisted of 5 talks from Penn PD/GS and 33 poster presentations from UPR students, which served as an opportunity for presenters to not only further develop their science communication skills but to also provide participant with a platform to showcase the amazing work being conducted within the collaboration.

In a collaborative effort between the University of Pennsylvania MRSEC (LRSM), the University of Delaware MRSEC (CHARM), and the University of Delaware Energy Frontier Research Center (CPI), 36 summer undergraduate research scholars engaged in a day designed to encourage connection and science exploration through shared experiences across MRSECs. 

Penn MRSEC researcher Janmey and colleagues showed that mechanical shear strain on fibrin gels — the protein scaffolding that holds a blood clot together — speeds up both of fibrin's natural remodeling enzymes: Factor XIIIa, which covalently crosslinks the fibers, and plasmin, which proteolytically degrades them.