We will seek 2 Ph.D. students for the upcoming admissions cycle (Fall 2024 incoming class), through the Berkeley Mechanical Engineering.

We may seek 1 Ph.D. student for the upcoming admissions cycle (Fall 2024 incoming class), through the Berkeley EECS.

In addition to applying through the official application portals, please contact Prof. Yao (liningy@berkeley.edu) for interviews. Please prepare for 30 min to talk in-depth about a) your technical expertise; b) one impressive and representative project from the past; and c) your concrete ideas and broad vision about potential Ph.D. projects that fit into the scope below.

We look for students who have both rigorous technical backgrounds and imaginative visions to bring creativity and interdisciplinary thinking together.

The open positions may include the following emphases.

• Experimental Track - Engineering Design of Morphing Matter: Engineering design, focusing on device design and manufacturing with an emphasis on socially impactful applications. Smart actuation, mechanical computation, and energy harvesting mechanisms are key. We are particularly interested in applications that have a positive environmental impact, e.g., for environmental monitoring, conservation, restoration, and remediation efforts. Mechanics knowledge is needed to derive quantitative experiments, analyze the system behavior, and/or model the system with numerical methods such as FEA or mass-spring models. Design methods including biomimetic design, and nature- or user-centered processes may be relevant when determining the system and application.

• Computational Track - Computational Design, Modeling, and Optimization of Morphing Mechanisms: Modeling both geometry and mechanics of different morphing systems and leveraging various optimization methods, including ML, genetic algorithms, generative design techniques, and other data-driven methods, to not only simulate but also design/derive mechanisms, behaviors, and systems. While the candidate may focus on computational methods, gaining hands-on experience and design insights to identify intriguing morphing mechanisms to study is critical. Often, the computational design candidate has to lead or participate in the process of designing and interpreting physical experiments. Gaining knowledge and insights in modeling physical morphing systems requires an understanding of the mechanics and mechanisms of chosen morphing systems. In general, the candidate is expected to like coding and engineering applied math.

More broadly, we are looking for students in one or multiple of these directions:

• Expanding the multifunctionality of morphing materials and systems in the realms of actuation, sensing, biodegradation, mechanical computation, and energy harvesting.

• Exploring sustainable and ecological applications of morphing matter (please refer to our vision paper on Sustainable Morphing Matter)

• Inventing novel morphing mechanisms or manufacturing strategies that enable new functionalities of morphing matter.

• Advancing the fundamental science and understanding of morphing mechanisms.

• Developing hardware and/or computational design tools for advanced morphing matter.

What is your academic community / Where do you publish papers?

We expect you to choose a home community in either HCI (e.g., ACM CHI, UIST) or (Soft) Robotics (e.g., IROS, ICRA), and regularly publish in top conference venues.

In addition, we encourage you to aim high and publish at least one or two papers in top journals (e.g., Nature, Science, Science Advances, etc)

Aside from attending academic conferences from your home community (again, either HCI or Robotics), we offer the opportunity and encourage you to attend interdisciplinary conferences in the field of material science, mechanics, and manufacturing (e.g., MRS, SES, and GRCs), and/or computer science (e.g., Siggraph, CVPR), depending on your academic career path.