The Laboratory for Material Chemomechanics in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering develops experimental and computational approaches toward the understanding of a key phenomenon in active materials: coupling between the mechanical and structural/functional states. By exploring coupling at the fundamental force and length scales of atoms and molecules, we seek to find commonalities among material systems ranging from metallic crystals to living biological cells that we can exploit for human advantage in sensing, actuating, and transduction applications. As a result, we develop in parallel several enabling nanomechanical frameworks such as nano/picoindentation, atomic force microscopy and functional force imaging.

Molecular dynamics simulations of polymer nanofibers show size-dependent properties. From S. Curgul et al.

Spring 2008 Group Meetings

Chemomechanical mapping of ligand-receptor binding kinetics on living cells, PNAS June 2007
Cover image acquired by Sunyoung Lee.

© 2008, Van Vliet Group and Massachusetts Institute of Technology: 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room 8-214; Cambridge, MA 02139 USA