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Over millions of years, Nature has developed a variety of highly effective, sustainable solutions to a
wide range of problems. Relatively recent advances in materials science are now making it possible
for scientists and engineers to adapt similar strategies for human problems. In this seminar, I will
present our recent work on two such efforts: (1) exploring new ways of creating infection-resistant
materials for healthcare that remove the need for antibiotics and (2) leveraging industrial
mass-manufacturing capacity to create large-scale surfaces with functionality such as sensing. In
our work on infection-resistant materials, we draw from the way that Nature uses liquid-like layers
as one effective method to control microorganisms. We created a similar system for commercially
available urinary catheters, one of the most widely used and infection-prone medical devices. Tests
of the modified catheter materials both in vitro and in vivo demonstrated that the presence of a
liquid-like surface effectively prevented the attachment and spread of six of the most common
pathogens in catheter-associated urinary tract infection. The materials also resisted colonization by
an emerging fungal pathogen of concern, Candidozyma auris. In our work on functional surfaces, we
repurpose a butterfly-scale-inspired nanoscale surface textured produced at 4,000m
2/h for the fashion industry as a water-quality sensor. By continuously monitoring the diffraction pattern
produced by the surface texture as water passes over it, we show that it is possible to detect and
quantify a variety of model contaminants including chemical compounds, sediment, and algae.
Preliminary field testing in estuaries, rivers, and lakes around º£½ÇÉçÇø confirmed the potential of
bio-inspired diffraction sensing for low-cost environmental monitoring. Together, these projects
provide a glimpse of the range of solutions that can be generated by looking to Nature for inspiration.