Lecture
Location
Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium
Milstein Hall
Contact
Department of Design Tech
Abstract
Nature produces a remarkable diversity of intricately architectured mineralized composites that, in many instances, far exceed the performance of their modern engineering analogs. Despite significant investigations into structure-function relationships in these complex biological materials, in many instances, there is a lack of critical information regarding the specific functional roles of many components of these structural hierarchies. Here, we introduce the technique of multi-material additive manufacturing, which we employ as a research tool to unravel the functional complexities of a wide range of biological materials, including laminated composites, photonic architectures, and low-drag surface coatings.
This lecture is part of the Design Tech Public Lecture Series.
Biography
James Weaver
James C. Weaver runs the Wide-Field Electron Optics Laboratory and leads the Biologically Inspired Materials and Design Group. Working at the interface between zoology, materials science, biomedical engineering, and multimaterial 3D printing, his main research interests focus on investigating structure-function relationships in hierarchically ordered biological composites and the advanced fabrication of their synthetic analogues. He has played critical roles in the development of new model systems for the study of a wide range of biomineralization processes. He is an internationally recognized and award-winning scanning electron microscopist. With a strong history of national and international academic and industrial collaborations, he has coauthored more than 150 journal articles in the biological, physical, and geological sciences. His work has been featured on the covers of more than 40 scientific journals, and he has contributed to numerous collaborative art installations, which have been exhibited in Berlin, Boston, Frankfurt, London, New York, Paris, and San Francisco.
Weaver’s position at Cornell is a joint appointment in the multicollege department of Design Tech and Cornell Engineering’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering.
