News
Allen Seok Receives WISH Poster Award
Congratulations to high school student mentee Allen Seok on receiving a Poster Award from Georgia Tech’s Wearable Intelligent Systems and Healthcare (WISH) Center. Mentored by Shiqi Wei and Siddharth K Sivakumar, Allen presented their work on air-permeable hydrogel electrodes for wearable physiological monitoring. The project aims to make wearable sensors more breathable and comfortable without sacrificing signal quality.
We are grateful to Shiqi and Siddharth for their mentorship and to the WISH Center organizers for a wonderful event.
Xinyi Ding and Lai Sze Fung Receive Fall 2026 Fellowships
Congratulations to Xinyi Ding and Lai Sze Fung on receiving fellowship support for Fall 2026! Xinyi was selected for the Christopher Sanders Fellowship, and Lai Sze was selected for the Brantley Fellowship, in recognition of their academic performance, engagement in the MSE community, and commitment to Georgia Tech values.
We are very proud of both of them and congratulate them on these well-deserved recognitions!
Christian Kim Completes MSE Research Scholars Fellowship
Congratulations to Christian Kim for completing his MSE Research Scholars Fellowship for the Summer of 2026. He has made a lot of research progress in the field of soft active matter during the summer, and we are excited to continue working with him in Fall 2026 as he continues his summer project!
Air-Permeable Hydrogels Published in Nature
We are excited to share that our paper, “Air-permeable hydrogels through viscoelastic phase separation of aerogels,” has been published in Nature! The work introduces a viscoelastic phase separation strategy to create highly air-permeable, water-rich hydrogels.
Congratulations to our PhD student Haodong Hu and undergraduate summer scholar Gabriella Carreira for their contributions as co-authors!
Christian Kim and Stephanie Li Receive PURA Awards
We are incredibly proud of both Christian Kim and Stephanie Li for receiving the competitive President’s Undergraduate Research Award (PURA) for Fall 2026. The two of them put a lot of effort into their proposals and have grown tremendously as researchers. We look forward to working with both of them this upcoming fall.
Xinyi Ding and Haodong Hu Pass Qualifying Exams
We are thrilled to celebrate an important milestone for our lab. Our graduate students, Xinyi Ding and Haodong Hu, have both successfully passed their qualifying exams! We are proud of their hard work and look forward to their continued research progress!
SRM-Lab Awarded a 2026 RBI Fellowship
Excited to share that our group has been awarded a 2026 RBI Fellowship with Dr. Julene Tong (GT, ChBE) for our project, “Robust Packaging Insert via Phase-Separated Lignin Aerogel Particle-Supported Cellulose Hydrogel Composites.”
Paper Published in *Nature Water*
Our recent paper on a metre-scale vertical origami hydrogel panel for atmospheric water harvesting in Death Valley has just been published in Nature Water! This study demonstrates a device capable of pulling safe drinking water directly from air, enabled by shape-morphing origami hydrogels that optimize water capture and release.