Engineering Fellowships for Growth - Morphogenesis Manufacturing: Smart Materials with Programmed Transformations

The future of manufacturing depends on a number of technological breakthroughs in robotics, sensors and high-performance computing, to name a few. However, nothing will have a greater impact on how things are made, and their subsequent capability, than the constituent materials from which they are constructed. This Fellowship will advance the underpinning engineering science, and demonstrate the potential of 'bottom-up' additive manufacturing to produce advanced metamaterials (materials not found in nature or engineering). To achieve this outcome, active advanced multifunctional materials, exhibiting programmed intelligence in complex 3D architectures, will be developed through creative manufacture. These new modes of assembly, i.e. manufacturing as a 'growth process', will rely on smarter materials, not machines of increasing complexity.