9/29/2023 Julia Park
Written by Julia Park
Professor Markus Buehler spoke to a full house on Tuesday as the honored speaker at the 2023 Richard W. Kritzer Distinguished Lecture, held in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) Auditorium.
Buehler is the McAfee Professor of mechanical engineering and civil & environmental engineering at MIT – and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). His lecture was titled, “The mechanics of bio-inspired material intelligence.”
In this talk, Buehler reviewed how modeling, experiment and synthesis are integrated to understand, design and leverage novel smart material manufacturing for advanced mechanical properties. He spoke about the use of mechanics to fabricate innovative materials from the molecular scale upwards, with built-in bio-inspired intelligence and novel properties, while sourced from sustainable resources, and breaking the barrier between living and non-living systems. His talk covered several case studies covering distinct scales, from silk, to collagen, to biomineralized materials, as well as applications to food and agriculture. A specific focus of the lecture was on the use of transformer-based attention models as foundational theories, ultimately applied to solve multi-modal material modeling, design and analysis problems.
In his research, Buehler pursues new modeling, design and manufacturing approaches for advanced biomaterials that offer greater resilience and a wide range of controllable properties from the nano- to the macroscale. His interests include a variety of functional biomaterial properties including mechanical, optical and biological, linking chemical features, hierarchical and multiscale structures, to performance in the context of physiological, pathological and other extreme conditions. His methods include molecular and multiscale modeling, design, as well as experimental synthesis and characterization. His particular interest lies in the mechanics of complex hierarchical materials with features across scales. An expert in computational materials science and AI, he pioneered the field of materiomics, and demonstrated broad impacts in the study of mechanical properties of complex materials, including predictive materials design and manufacturing.
The Richard W. Kritzer Distinguished Lecture is supported by the Richard W. Kritzer endowment fund, initiated in 1988.