Jennifer A. Lewis

Biosketch

Jennifer Lewis is a materials scientist recognized for her work on directed assembly of functional, structural and biological materials. Lewis was born in Daytona Beach, Florida and grew up primarily in North Carolina, Ohio and Illinois. She graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) with a degree in ceramic engineering and from MIT in 1991 with a Sc.D. in ceramic science. She joined the faculty at UIUC in 1990, where she served as Director of the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory from 2006-2012. She joined the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University in 2013, where she currently holds the title of Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering and serves as a core faculty member of the Wyss Institute. Her research resides at the intersection of materials science, advanced manufacturing, bioengineering and developmental biology. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Research Interests

Jennifer Lewis' laboratory is interested in designing, building, and characterizing architected soft matter. Her team has developed a broad array of materials and printing methods that enable one to digitally program the composition, geometry, and function across multiple length scales. Of specific interest, the creation of synthetic and living matter that emulate the exquisite hierarchical structure and multifunctionality found in natural systems. Through foundational advances in understanding and exploiting the phase behavior, rheology, and microstructure of "inks" used in multi-dimensional printing techniques, her lab has created lithium ion batteries as small as a single grain of sand, soft electronics, shape-morphing hydrogels and elastomers, fully autonomous soft robots, and vascularized organ-specific tissues for repair and regeneration.