Seminar Speaker: Dr. Michael Ford, Lawrence Livermore National Lab

Speaker Dr. Michael Ford, Lawrence Livermore National Lab

Title “Toward Physical Intelligence Using Functional Soft Matter”

To facilitate interactions with humans, machines of the future will require soft, multifunctional materials. The key to understanding how to enable new functionalities lies in understanding why these functionalities manifest. In this talk, I’ll provide examples that illustrate how the assembly and synthesis of soft matter can enable new functionalities that could be beneficial for soft machines. In particular, I’ll first focus on soft composites that contain dispersed droplets of a metal that is liquid at room temperature. Functionality like electrical conductivity is enabled by the assembly of these droplets. In one example, multifunctionality is achieved when a shape morphing polymer is used in conjunction with the liquid metal. Following this example, I’ll introduce how additive manufacturing will also be critical to the production of soft machines of the future. I’ll describe how changes in the chemical structure of printable elastomers influence their properties. Overall, these examples that I highlight will illustrate how materials synthesis and structure-property relationships can enable new functionalities for soft machines.

Michael Ford is a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), where he works on a wide range of projects related to scintillators and additive manufacturing of custom polysiloxane inks. Ford earned his Ph.D. in Materials from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he studied characterization and molecular design of organic semiconductors. In addition to his research activities at LLNL, he is a member of the Abilities Champions Employee Resource Group, which promotes the inclusion of interns and employees with physical, psychological, developmental, and neurocognitive differences as valuable contributors to the Laboratory’s mission. His position at LLNL follows a postdoctoral position in the Soft Machines Lab at Carnegie Mellon University. Under the direction of Prof. Carmel Majidi, he focused on the synthesis and characterization of new multifunctional materials for soft machines. Learn more about Dr. Ford on Twitter or faculty profile.