The vast amount of biological mysteries and biomedical challenges faced by human provide a prominent drive for seamlessly merging electronics with biological living systems (e.g. human bodies) to achieve long-term stable functions. Towards this trend, the main bottlenecks are the huge mechanical mismatch between the current form of rigid electronics and the soft biological tissues.

In this talk, I will describe a new form of electronics with skin-like softness and stretchability, which is built upon a new class of intrinsically stretchable polymer materials and a new set of fabrication technology. As the core material basis, intrinsically stretchable polymer semiconductors have been developed through the physical engineering of polymer chain dynamics and crystallization based on the nanoconfinement effect. This fundamentally-new and universally-applicable methodology enables conjugated polymers to possess both high electrical-performance and extraordinary stretchability.[1] Then, proceeding towards building electronics with this new class of polymer materials, the first polymer-applicable fabrication platform has been designed for large-scale intrinsically stretchable transistor arrays.[2] More recently, we also established a mechanical-programming design for intrinsically stretchable electronics, which eventually realized the strain-insensitive electrical performance under human-integrated operation conditions. As a whole, these renovations in the material basis and technology foundation have led to the realization of circuit-level functionalities for the processing of biological signals, with unprecedented mechanical deformability and skin conformability. Equipping electronics with human-compatible form-factors has opened a new paradigm for wearable and implantable bio-electronic tools for biological studies, personal healthcare, medical diagnosis and therapeutics.[3]

In the last part of the talk, I will also introduce briefly about the PhD program in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago.

References

[1] J. Xu#, S. Wang#, et al. Highly stretchable polymer semiconductor films through the nanoconfinement effect, Science, 2017, 355, 59-64.

[2] S. Wang, et al. Skin electronics from scalable fabrication of an intrinsically stretchable transistor array, Nature, 2018, 555, 83-88.

[3] S. Wang, J. Y. Oh, J. Xu, H. Tran, Z. Bao. Skin-inspired electronics: an emerging paradigm, Accounts of Chemical Research, 2018, 51, 1033–1045.

报告人简历：

Sihong Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, USA. He received his Ph.D. degree in Materials Science and Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2014 under the supervision of Prof. Zhong Lin Wang, and his Bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University in 2009. From 2015 to 2018, he was a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Zhenan Bao in Chemical Engineering at Stanford University. He has published 24 first-authored papers in numerous high-impact journals, including Nature, Science, Nature Communications, Advanced Materials, Energy & Environmental Science, Nano Letters and ACS Nano, with the total publication number of 56. His research group currently focuses on soft polymeric bioelectronic materials and devices as the new generation of technology for biomedical studies and practices. As of June 2019, his research has been cited more than 8,700 times and he has an H-index of 46. He was awarded MRS Graduate Student Award, Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Students Abroad, Top 10 Breakthroughs of 2012 by Physics World, etc.

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