Summer 2021
SungWoo Nam is an Associate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.
Many mechanical deformations, such as buckling, crumpling, wrinkling, collapsing, and delamination, are usually considered as threats to mechanical integrity and are avoided or reduced in the traditional design of materials and structures. Our research goes against these conventions by tailoring such mechanical instabilities to create new functional morphologies. We use ultralow bending stiffness and semiconducting properties of atomically-thin materials to enable emerging mechanically-coupled properties (e.g., quantum emission, exciton localization/condensation, tunable plasmonics, flexoelectricity, etc.) and device-level multi-functionalities that extend beyond those of bulk material systems.