Megan Valentine
University of California-Santa Barbara, CA·Materials Science
Living cells change shape, move and apply force on their own schedule, guided by internal biological clocks and circuits. Man-made 'active' materials usually need an outside trigger to do anything.
- Fields
Materials Science
Biophysics
Engineering
- Topics
living materials
biotic-abiotic materials
programmable materials
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Sep 2026
What they work on
- Build layered materials that pair synthetic hydrogels with living cytoskeleton composites, protein filament networks, fitted with cellular timing circuits that make material-modifying proteins on a set schedule.
- Create a proof-of-concept gap-closing micro-actuator that closes under light and reopens on its own at times and locations programmed into embedded cell circuits.
- Map how material recipes relate to structure, mechanics and function through design-build-test-learn cycles combining multi-scale modeling with high-throughput mechanical and structural characterization.
- Assemble and publicly share a formulation-property database for programmable living materials to support the Materials Genome Initiative community.
More about the research
This collaborative project, run by a team of physicists, biologists and engineers across five campuses, aims to build materials that behave more like living things. These materials would do work and move on a programmed timetable, without outside control.
Why it matters
Materials that move and reshape themselves on a programmed schedule could eventually enable self-healing infrastructure, self-regulating delivery vehicles, self-propelled materials, micro-robots and programmable dynamic prosthetics. Public recipe-property libraries could help other materials researchers design and make such living materials.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Martin Harmer
Lehigh University, PA·Materials Science
Discover new sodium-ion conducting oxide ceramics by combining ultra-high-temperature synthesis, which sinters materials in about 10 seconds, with first-principles data-driven computation and high-throughput measurements.
Gannon Jennings
Vanderbilt University, TN·Engineering
Identify, synthesize and test new polymer membranes that separate water from polar organic solvents by pervaporation, using ring-opening metathesis polymerization and spin coating.
Vivek Shenoy
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Biomedical Engineering
Characterize and engineer proteins and nanostructures that respond to piconewton forces and nanometer displacements, to build mechano-biological reagents and materials.
The school
University of California-Santa Barbara: 17 labs on PI Pages, $303M a year on research, 403 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.