Anna Balazs, John A. Swanson Chair of Engineering and Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering in the Swanson School of Engineering, has heard her work described many ways: biomimicry, soft robotics, soft materials, self-assembling materials.
“I don’t know if I like any of those terms,” says Balazs. “What we would like to do is blur the line between the living and nonliving and use principles from biology to make materials that show lifelike attributes. We are designing living systems.”
Balazs has described biology as a source of inspiration and metaphors. After her family fled Hungary in 1956, watching her veterinarian father drew her into science. Observing plant and animal life led Balazs to the concept of materials organizing themselves, like trees growing annual rings and amphibians growing back severed limbs.
Observing organisms like mimosa plants, whose leaves suddenly collapse if they are touched, draws her to design materials that would be equally responsive to pressure, touch and temperature change.
In search of that material, Balazs has created unique computational models of self-assembling behavior in polymers, nanomaterials and fluids. Along the way, she earned a long line of distinctions, including the rare achievement of being elected to both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering in the space of one year. Most recently, she won the 2025 Gutenberg Research Award from Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany.
Exploring materials with biological functions led to the concept of using those materials for computing. In a 2020 research paper, Balazs and her colleagues created a model of circuitry-free systems powered by the interactions of beams of light trapped in a gel material. The interactions create wave guides that can be used to create fundamental computing algorithms.
Could this work at scale to do practical computing?
“There was this wonderful quote that if you think of a new technology, then you don’t want it for an old purpose,” says Balazs. “New technology for computing allows you to do new things, and it is not wise to use it for an older application because it will be slower in lots of ways. But it can open the door to something else.”