News

Building on our prior works using Inertial Microcavitation Rheometry (IMR), we present a comprehensive list of the high-strain rate (> 10^3 1/s) mechanical properties of these three popular classes of hydrogel materials characterized via laser-based IMR, further showing that the choice in finite-deformation, rate-dependent constitutive model can be informed directly… read more 

Thanks to the nomination by the Department of Aerospace Engineering & Engineering Mechanics and financial support from the Cockrell School of Engineering at UT-Austin, Dr. Yang has been selected to attend the 2024 National Effective Teaching Institute (NETI-1) Course Design & Student Engagement Workshop in San Diego, CA.  

By harnessing sound, the viscoelastic properties of soft materials at high strain rates (> 1,000 1/s) can be decoded based on a modified Rayleigh cavitation bubble collapse time. Congratulations on our newly accepted Physics of Fluids research paper being selected as a Featured Article: “Estimating viscoelastic, soft material properties using… read more 

Shimadzu Hyper Vision HPV-X2 ultra high-speed camera has arrived. HPV-X2 can capture extremely fast-rate dynamic events at 10 million fps with 100k pixels per frame. Please stay tuned for more cool videos/images from our lab in the future!

Our new paper “Open Source, In‑Situ, Intermediate Strain‑Rate Tensile Impact Device for Soft Materials and Cell Culture Systems” has been accepted by Experimental Mechanics. Intermediate-strain-rate mechanical testing of soft and biological materials is important when designing, measuring, predicting, or manipulating an object or system’s response to common impact scenarios. In this work,… read more 

We are thrilled to announce that Jeffrey Leu, our senior undergraduate research student, has received the UT Undergraduate Research Fellowship to support his research proposal “Efficient and Accurate Material Property Extraction from Data-Driven Digital Image Correlation Designs and Tests“. Congratulations, Jeffrey, for this remarkable achievement!

We are excited to share our lab’s new instrument — Nikon AX confocal camera — has been installed. More cool microscopy images are on their way! Please stay tuned! We also want to express our gratitude to Jon Ekman, Anil Shukla, and Jacob Burnett for helping us set up this… read more 

After an intense and highly productive summer of research, we are thrilled to welcome three new members to our group: Dan Frolkin, Lehu Bu, and Zixiang Tong. They will officially join us starting in the fall of 2023. Welcome aboard! Sophie Polidoro and Zhaobang Hou have completed their summer research… read more 

Our new paper “Optomechanically Actuated Hydrogel Platform for Cell Stimulation with Spatial and Temporal Resolution” has been accepted by ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering. This work was led by Prof. Khalid Salaita @Gatech & Emory University — Department of Biomedical Engineering, and in collaboration with Prof. Christian Franck @University of… read more