Call for Papers

Please contact the symposium organizers with questions.

This symposium will cover current trends, advances, and perspectives on the synthesis and use of soft and healable conducting (and/or mixed-conducting) polymers and hydrogels for various emerging applications, including, but not limited to, medical wearables, biomimetic devices, tissue engineering, and biological interfacing. Soft and healable conducting polymers and hydrogels are heavily researched at the forefront to explore their ultimate potential in impacting multiple research fields, ranging from materials science, device engineering, microelectronics, tissue engineering, flexible & stretchable electronics, to iontronics. However, despite recent advances, their synthesis, fabrication, and integration remain challenging due to the difficulty of combining inherently and mutually exclusive properties, such as ionic conductivity, electronic conductivity, stretchability, healability, diffusive property, toughness, and fatigue properties. Additionally, their use in different application scenarios requires these materials to survive in complicated, humid, and electrolytic environments, imposing additional requirements on basic material properties such as viscoelasticity, adhesion, breathability, diffusion dynamics, and stability, etc. This symposium will cover efforts to advance soft and healable conducting polymers and hydrogels, as well as other similiar materials applied to and designed for broad applications. We will stimulate a debate on using different approaches to overcome the challenges in obtaining soft and healable properties while maintaining charge transport properties. This symposium will bring together investigators from multiple disciplines and address the synthesis, characterization, processing, fabrication, and manufacturing of soft and healable conducting polymers or hydrogels or other hydrated materials that either (1) possess advanced properties, including electronic, ionic, magnetic, optical, piezoelectric, rheological, breathability, and adhesive properties, or (2) are used in the construction of functional devices, such as soft and healable electrode arrays, sensors, medical wearables, biomimetic devices, soft robotics, actuators, and electrical stimulation of cell-laden tissue-engineered scaffolds.

Topics will include:

• Soft and healable conducting polymers and hydrogels & proteins: synthesis, characterization and application
• Healable electronic materials, devices, systems
• Various form factors of soft conducting materials (fibers, composites, 3D porous scaffolds)
• Soft conducting materials with additional/unique properties (healable, stretchable)
• Electronically and/or ionically conducting materials
• Bioinspired and biomimetic devices
• Hydrogels in soft robotics (e.g. actuators)
• Embodied self-awareness, 3D shape reconstruction
• Ionic, electronic, magnetic, and optical devices comprised of polymers, hydrogels, natural materials, and other hydrated materials
• Processing, patterning and manufacturing of polymer thin films, hydrogels
• Multimodal biointerfaces
• Brain-inspired computing

Invited Speakers (tentative):

• Eloise Bihar (University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, USA)
• Tricia Carmichael (University of Windsor, Canada)
• Vivian Feig (Stanford University, USA)
• Laure Kayser (University of Delaware, USA)
• Stéphanie Lacour (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland)
• Ting Lei (Peking University, China)
• Wei-lin Leong (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
• Jia Liu (Harvard University, USA)
• Nanshu Lu (The University of Texas at Austin, USA)
• Jenny Malmstrom (The University of Auckland, New Zealand)
• Ivan Minev (Leibniz Institut für Polymerforschung Dresden e.V., Germany)
• Charalampos Pitsalidis (Khalifa University, United Arab Emirates)
• Eleni Stavrinidou (Linköping University, Sweden)
• Bozhi Tian (The University of Chicago, USA)
• Helen Tran (University of Toronto, Canada)
• Christina Tringides (Rice University, USA)
• Lizhi Xu (The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)
• Cunjiang Yu (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
• Xuanhe Zhao (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)

Symposium Organizers