Tingyi Liu
University of Massachusetts, MA·Engineering
Soft, stretchy electronics that bend and grow with living tissue could record and stimulate nerves and the brain for years, but they tend to fail in the body. Salty body fluids leak into their insulating layers, and mismatches in stiffness between device and tissue trigger inflammation.
- Fields
Engineering
Biomedical Engineering
Materials Science
- Topics
stretchable bioelectronics
encapsulation
dielectric
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Develop a stretchable, ion-blocking insulating coating for bioelectronics by engineering existing stretchable materials to mimic the cell membrane's lipid bilayer.
- Test the mechanism, mechanical robustness and long-term electrical stability of the bioinspired ion barrier through combined theoretical and experimental studies.
- Manufacture super-repellent surfaces from hybrid structures of rigid parts on a soft base that sink in under folding or hammering and then recover, keeping their liquid repellency.
- Determine how material choices and detailed geometry affect the durability of hybrid repellent surfaces, and turn the results into engineering design guidelines.
- Test whether gallium-based liquid metals combined with stretchable elastomers give soft neural probes stable electrochemical impedance (signal transfer between device and tissue) and tunable stiffness in body-like conditions.
- Establish design rules for liquid-metal-embedded stretchable neural probes that could record from growing brain tissue without a foreign body response.
More about the research
A related problem appears in water-repelling surfaces: the shapes that repel liquids best are also the easiest to break. Across three projects, the work asks how to reconcile material properties that usually conflict, using bioinspired designs and combinations of soft and rigid or liquid and solid materials.
Why it matters
Implanted brain and nerve devices often fail because body fluids leak into their insulation and because stiff hardware inflames soft tissue. Longer-lasting, tissue-matched probes could give neuroscientists stable long-term recordings and could eventually support treatments for brain disorders. Durable liquid-repellent surfaces could make anti-icing, drag-reducing, heat-transfer and anti-fouling coatings practical in everyday use.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Manufacturing of Super-Repellent Surfaces with High Mechanical Resilience
NSF · Sep 2023 – Aug 2027
Engineering of Stretchable Neural Interfaces Using Liquid Metals for Stable Electrical Communication and Adaptive Stiffness Transformation
NIH · Aug 2023 – Jul 2027
EAGER: A Stretchable Ion Barrier for Bioelectronic Encapsulation
NSF · Oct 2024 – Sep 2026
Closest labs
Shuhao Liu
University of Texas at Tyler, TX·Materials Science
Establish a scalable convective self-assembly process that uses meniscus-guided blade coating to form ordered silica nanoparticle arrays on aluminum and high-density polyethylene (HDPE).
Eric Freeman
University of Georgia, GA·Engineering
Build networks of lipid-coated droplets, joined by droplet interface bilayers that act as model synapses, that adapt their connections in response to the signals they transmit.
Lee Miller
Northwestern University, IL·Biomedical Engineering
Build decoders that predict intended muscle activity (EMG) from primary motor cortex spiking recorded in humans with high-level spinal cord injury, trained with EMG, hand posture and force data from able-bodied people doing the same actions.
The school
University of Massachusetts: 28 labs on PI Pages, $282M a year on research, 337 research doctorates a year.
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