CAREER: The Science Underpinning Mechanical Self-Assembly

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) proposes research on Mechanical Self-Assembly which is a new approach to fabrication at the micron- and submicron-scales, where controlled mechanical failure may be utilized to generate highly ordered buckling, cracking, and buckle delamination patterns in thin films. Through comprehensive numerical, theoretical, and experimental investigations, the mechanisms governing the intriguing spontaneous pattern formations will be understood. Reverse analyses will be carried out to design and control components that organize themselves into desired patterns and functions. The efforts are especially aimed at providing sufficiently complete results and present them in a relatively simple way such that they may receive wide applications in microelectronics, MEMS, and biomedical engineering. These spontaneous patterns will be employed to manufacture microarrays for biosensors and drug delivery, study protein and cell migration, and fabricate ordered nanowires. Mechanical self-assembly is a wide-open field of great scientific interest, technological importance, and educational value, to which solid mechanics can make substantial contributions. It is expected that mechanical self-assembly will yield new and relatively easy solutions to microfabrication, thereby benefit the larger engineering community. An educational program is fully integrated with the research effort to meet the ever-increasing educational demands of materials and nanotechnology, which includes a summer program to engage underprivileged New York high-school students in science and engineering, new undergraduate and graduate courses, and an outreach program to inform the general public via remote learning. The career development plan will build a firm foundation for a lifetime of integrated contributions to research and education in mechanical self-assembly, and poised for long-term significance and sustainability.