Congrats to Taryn Imamura and Nick Chung for presenting their exciting work on colloidal "DNA" robots presented at ICRA 2025! Taryn and equal co-author Teresa Kent (from co-advisor Sarah Bergbreiter's lab) developed a methodology for extracting locomotion information for magnetically actuated microswimmers in complex environments with dynamic fluid flows. This work is essential for translating, pun intended, this technology into target applications.

Undergraduate researcher, Nick Chung, worked closely with Taryn and the two have also developed a workflow for dynamic reorientation of microswimmers to control microswimmer heading irrespective of magnetic moment of an individual swimmer. Nick presented this this work at the Unusual Robots workshop at ICRA.

Congratulations to Dr. Sebastian Arias for successfully defending his thesis today. Fantastic work!

Dr. Sebastian Arias shown celebrating immediately after his defense with a portion of his committee (left to right: Prof. Rebecca Taylor, Dr. Sebastian Arias, Prof. Markus Deserno, and Prof. Stephanie Tristram-Nagle [4th committee member Prof. Jonathan Cagan not pictured])

Congratulations to Research Masters student Karthik Subramaniam on winning a Best Poster Award at the MechE MS Research Symposium or his work simulating the locomotion of compliant microswimming robots.

Many thanks the National Academy of Sciences and PNAS for inviting me to present on AI and automated science at the 16th NAS 2025 Journal Summit in Washington, D.C. from March 19-20, 2025.

Inspiring talks by co-panelists Prof. Jeannette Wing (Columbia University) and Dr. Roy Perlis (Massachusetts General Hospital) and the insightful questions by moderator Dr. Roger Schonfeld (ITHAKA S+R) made for an exciting session focused on how AI (writ broadly) will change the practice of science and how those results are communicated!

Congratulations to Isabella Ferranti and Taryn Imamura for both winning MechE Graduate Fellowships!

Isabella has been awarded the G. Sundback Graduate Fellowship, and Taryn has been awarded the Nam Pyo and Young Suh Graduate Fellowship.

Congratulations on this recognition for your research accomplishments!

Many thanks to Prof. Khalid Salaita and the Center on Probes for Molecular Mechanotechnology (CPMM) at Emory University for inviting to present at the Forces at Play seminar series! The Youtube video for this seminar is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yj4tPSL6_JI.

I'm also delighted to share the sketchnotes of the seminar by Mathis Riehle, which are available on his blog, TalksAsDoodles.

Many thanks to Prof. Kate Adamala and rest of the steering committee for the Build-a-Cell Seminar Series for inviting me to present our lab's work! Youtube video is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43V869pteQk.

This exciting synthetic cell research community aims to build artificial life by reconstituting cellular functions from the bottom up. We hope that our team's efforts on engineering cellular interfaces and transport mechanisms at the microscale may be used to address open challenges and opportunities in creating synthetic cells and systems thereof.

Logan Carpenter (soon-to-be-postdoc) and PhD student Abraham Polanco have joined the lab! Welcome!!

Congrats to AJ on his paper Generative design-enabled exploration of wireframe DNA origami nanostructures that was just published in Nucleic Acids Research!

In this paper, AJ, who is co-advised by Prof. Jonathan Cagan, introduces a generative design framework for generating sets of wireframe DNA origami nanostructures without the need for a predefined mesh. This tool, for the first time, supports multi-objective optimization inputs, which represent critical tradeoffs in effective nanostructure design.

Further details can be found in Phys.org piece and article on the Diversifying DNA Origami on the CMU Engineering website.

Taryn's paper "Complex Assemblies of Colloidal Microparticles with Compliant DNA Linkers and Magnetic Actuation" was published in Advanced Materials Technologies.

This work was also highlighted by the College of Engineering and Phys.org in the article "Micro, modular, mobile—DNA-linked microrobots offer new possibilities in medicine and manufacturing".

Congratulations to Taryn on this massive advance to enable the templated assembly of DNA nanostructure-linked microrobots that are modular, complex and flexible. Congrats also go to undergraduate extraordinaire and second author, Nicholas Chung.

This was a fun collaborative effort with additional co-authors Utku Sonmez, Prof. Matthew Travers and Taryn's co-advisor, Prof. Sarah Bergbreiter.