Neda Maghsoodi
University of Southern California, CA·Materials Science
Materials that change shape on command are useful for soft robots, medical devices, and printed structures that reconfigure after they are made. Most of them need something attached: a heater, a wire, embedded particles, or a direct beam of light.
- Fields
Materials Science
Engineering
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
liquid crystal elastomer
focused ultrasound
remote actuation
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2029
What they work on
- Measure how focused ultrasound produces localized heating, phase transition, deformation, and recovery in programmed liquid crystal elastomers, recording temperature fields, deformation histories, and material properties across ultrasound conditions and material architectures.
- Use molecular dynamics simulations to determine how reorientation of the rod-like mesogens, polymer network relaxation, viscoelastic dissipation, and internal friction convert ultrasound energy into heat and motion.
- Link molecular-scale results to continuum constitutive models that capture the direction-dependent, nonlinear, temperature-dependent deformation of liquid crystal elastomers.
- Build and validate a single modeling platform combining acoustic wave propagation, heat transfer, molecular dynamics, solid mechanics, and physics-informed machine learning.
- Apply inverse design and autonomous optimization to identify geometry, molecular alignment, crosslink density, and ultrasound frequency, intensity, focal position, and exposure duration that achieve target shape changes within thermal and mechanical constraints.
More about the research
That is a problem whenever the material sits somewhere hard to reach, such as inside a sealed machine or inside the body. This project investigates driving shape change remotely with focused ultrasound, sound waves aimed to converge at a chosen point, delivering energy noninvasively and precisely where it is wanted. The material being actuated is a liquid crystal elastomer: a soft rubbery polymer whose rod-like molecular units, called mesogens, are aligned in a programmed pattern. When that internal order is disrupted, usually by heating past a transition temperature, the material contracts or bends by a large amount, and recovers when it cools. Pairing programmable molecular alignment with a steerable energy source could allow one piece of material to make different motions depending on where the ultrasound is focused.
Why it matters
Shape-changing materials cannot currently be actuated when they are enclosed or implanted, because they need heaters, wires, or direct light. Remote actuation with focused ultrasound could extend them to those settings, supporting soft robotic devices that work in confined spaces, adaptive structures, four-dimensional printing in which printed parts change shape over time, and biomedical technologies where a device must be triggered without surgery. The validated models and inverse-design tools could let engineers specify a target motion and obtain the material and ultrasound settings that produce it.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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The school
University of Southern California: 47 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 882 research doctorates a year.
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