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The DICE lab is pleased to welcome Will Boynton and Daniel Oluwalana, both of whom will join the group as PhD students.

Daniel joins us from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, where he completed his master’s degree, which focused on shape optimization of reprogrammable mechanical metamaterials. Will completed his bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech last year and has chosen to stay for his PhD.

We look forward to working with them, and we wish both the best of luck!

In their recent paper titled “Design Synthesis of a 4D-Printed Self-Tying Knot with Programmable Morphology,” Professor Kai James and his team of graduate students present a novel computational and experimental approach for designing and synthesizing material-based mechanisms capable of intricate pre-programmed motion. They showcase their methodology by creating a self-tying knot with a pre-programmed mechanism and validating it experimentally through a 3D-printed model. This innovative method represents a significant advancement in mechanism design, promising to usher in a new era of lightweight, adaptable, damage-resistant machines that can be easily manufactured using 3D printing technology. The breakthroughs outlined in this study hold the potential to usher in an entirely novel category of technologies centered around programmable material-based robotic systems. Crucially, this capability could serve as a fundamental building block for the realization of aspirational, life-saving technologies, including but not limited to artery-clearing microrobots, self-tying sutures, and numerous other disruptive innovations that may currently seem beyond imagination.

I am pleased to announce that DICE Lab PhD students Lee Alacoque and Corey Parott successfully defended their PhD dissertations. Lee’s dissertation introduced a novel method for designing loads and supports simultaneously with material distribution in density-based topology optimization, while Corey’s dissertation presented a multi-head self-attention generative adversarial network (GAN) for multiphysics topology optimization. Lee would be joining Divergent in Torrance, CA as a structures optimization engineer.

Congratulations Lee and Corey!

In August 2022, The DICE Lab, formerly known as the CDI Lab, officially moved from the University of Illinois to the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. We will continue to produce boundary-pushing research in computational design, and we look forward to forging new relationships with collaborators and sponsors while at our new institution.