Event
CHBE Seminar: Dr. Zhiwei Li, UMD
Friday, October 3, 2025
11:00 a.m.
Room 2108 Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Building
Patricia Lorenzana
301-405-1935
plorenza@umd.edu
“Engineering Superstructures for Smart Materials: from Photonics to Bioimaging and Biomimetics”
Abstract: Colloidal superstructures made of ordered nanoparticles have intriguing physical properties and are widely studied across various chemical disciplines. Engineering nanoscale order is therefore an effective approach to advanced materials. By combining computational tools with experimental chemical engineering, we are now unlocking many exciting possibilities in designing advanced superstructures for responsive photonics, background-free bioimaging, and biomimetic soft robotics.
In this seminar, I will discuss our research progress on engineering superstructures for nanophotonics and bioengineering by combining computing with materials science. In the first part, I will introduce the discovery of size-dependent magnetic interactions between nanorods, an interaction motif that is different from the magnetic forces predicted in modern physics and allows precision control over particle positional order for engineering advanced photonic materials. I will then highlight the discovery of quadrupole field chirality in non-zero spin materials using computer coding, a fundamentally new physical principle for assembling materials of any chemical compositions into chiral superstructures. This new field property enables control over nanorod orientational order for engineering chiral materials with reconfigurable chiroptical properties. The ability to control structural orders across different length scales allows us to develop photonic materials that have remote, reversible, and instantaneous optical responses to external stimuli. Using magnetic field stimuli, we developed a background-free bioimaging technique by in vivo assembling nanorods. An algorithm was created to automatically recognize the photoacoustic signals of the nanorods through fast Fourier transform, which generates images with significantly reduced background noises and enhanced signal-to-noise ratio. Driven by light stimuli, I will introduce an assembly strategy to create bionic walking and swimming soft robotics, which can mimic the features of natural creatures, like human and water striders, and perform self-adaptive body functions as well as biomimetic locomotion. Our work underpins the importance of controlling building block order in developing advanced materials, opening doors to chemically engineer wave propagation, mass transportation, and energy conversion in colloidal superstructures.
Bio: Dr. Zhiwei Li is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Maryland, College Park. He received his PhD in chemistry from the University of California, Riverside in 2019. He was a Richard P. Van Duyne postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Chemistry and the International Institute for Nanotechnology (IIN) at Northwestern University. He joined the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Maryland College Park in 2024. His research is focused on harnessing structural chemistry for nanophotonics and quantum physics.
