Printing soft materials for bio-inspired electronics 

Join Zoom Meeting: https://purdue-edu.zoom.us/j/91754078808

Abstract: Traditional electronic devices are flat and rigid, while biological systems are soft and 3-dimensional. Integrating technology with biology will be enabled by the use of 3D printing to create soft biointerfaces with future applications in systems that replace the function of body parts (prosthetics) or augment biology (eg. haptics). The first part of this talk will introduce my postdoctoral work on 3D printed soft electrostatic actuators. Soft electrostatic actuators can achieve large strains, but have traditionally been limited to planar formats. 3D printing provides the ability to achieve scalable fabrication of versatile 3D designs, but challenges remain to realize their full potential. The second part of this talk will describe my PhD work on bio-inspired sensor networks. 3D printing has the potential to provide important enabling capabilities in integrating sensors with actuation. 

Bio: Alex Chortos started as an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue in 2020. He earned his undergrad degree in Nanotechnology Engineering from the University of Waterloo in 2011. He completed his PhD at Stanford working with Zhenan Bao in 2017 working on stretchable electronics. He subsequently took a postdoctoral position at Harvard working with Jennifer Lewis on 3D printed soft actuators. Alex has published 28 papers on the topic of soft electronics for wearable and prosthetic devices.