Lining Yao
Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering
Director of the Morphing Matter Lab
Zheng-White Berkeley Engineering Faculty Fellow
Executive Committee, Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation (JIDI)
University of California, Berkeley
Email: liningy@berkeley.edu
Lining Yao is an Assistant Professor at the Mechanical Engineering department, the Univesrity of California, Berkeley, where she directs the Morphing Matter Lab (morphingmatter.org). Dr. Yao also has courtesy appointments in CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute.
Her research explores the positive impact of active and morphing materials on sustainable design across different scales and contexts. Her work focuses on discovering and studying morphing material mechanisms, as well as algorithms for computational design and fabrication pipelines. Dr. Yao has published in both computer science and physical science venues and has received nine Best Paper or Best Talk Awards and nominations from premier conferences in Human-Computer Interaction. Her journal papers have been featured as cover stories in Nature, Science Advances, and Advanced Materials Technologies. Her work has been widely featured in popular media outlets, including The New York Times, Wired, Scientific American, Fast Company, National Geographic, and BBC, among others. Dr. Yao received her Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab in 2017, and spent her time as a tenure-tracked faculty member at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University before joining UC Berkeley. She is the co-founder of the MorphingMatter4Girls Initiative, a Wired UK fellow, and an appointed instructor in eco-design by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization.
Featured Talks
Seminar talk by Lining Yao at Stanford, on human-computer interaction aspect of morphing matter. Link
TEDx Talk: What nature teaches us about sustainable design | Lining Yao | TEDxPittsburgh
Lining Yao giving a Keynote at the Symposium on Geometry Processing: “Computing Morphing Matter: the Marriage of Geometry and Hidden Forces”
Distinctive Voices presentation for the National Academy of Sciences. On sustainability of food and packaging design.
At Google, Lining Yao shares the interdisciplinary design philosophy of morphing matter.
Wired UK talk on bacteria powered sustainable breathing fabric.
Ars Electronic STARTS Journeys invited the lab to share its mission in a documentary film.