Wenjie Zhou

For More Information

• Group Website
• Google Scholar

Education

• Ph.D., Northwestern University, 2022
• Postdoctoral Scholar, Caltech, 2022-2025

Biography

Dr. Wenjie Zhou is an Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, with affiliations in Mechanical Science and Engineering and the Materials Research Laboratory. He leads the Intelligent Matter Lab, which creates physically intelligent materials: many-particle architectures whose geometry, topology, and interfaces enable them to adapt, reconfigure, protect, morph, and respond with minimal external control.

Zhou's research asks how intelligence can be embedded directly into matter. Instead of treating materials as passive substances, his group designs materials as dynamic systems built from many interacting parts, from DNA-programmed nanoparticles to 3D-printed interlocked architectures. By controlling shape, connectivity, contact, and entanglement, the lab seeks to create materials with built-in physical functions such as mechanical memory, adaptive stiffness, energy dissipation, deployability, and autonomous shape change.

Zhou's training spans chemistry, materials science, mechanical engineering, and computation. During his Ph.D. in Chemistry at Northwestern University, he developed geometry-inspired strategies for nanoparticle synthesis and DNA-mediated colloidal self-assembly, creating new classes of ordered nanoscale matter and optical metamaterials. As a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech, he introduced polycatenated architected materials, a new class of interlocked, many-particle materials that bridge the behavior of solids, fabrics, and granular matter.

At Illinois, the Intelligent Matter Lab combines AI-guided design, computational geometry, synthesis, self-assembly, additive manufacturing, mechanics, and in situ characterization. The long-term goal is to build adaptive material systems for robotics, aerospace, biomedical devices, resilient infrastructure, and future autonomous technologies.

Academic Positions

• Assistant Professor, Materials Science and Engineering (100%)
• Assistant Professor, Mechanical Science and Engineering (0%)
• Assistant Professor, Materials Research Laboratory (0%)

Research Statement

The central question of the Intelligent Matter Lab is: how can we embed physical intelligence directly into materials?

Most engineered systems separate structure, sensing, actuation, and control. Our group explores a different paradigm: materials whose architecture itself produces adaptive function. We study many-particle materials built from molecules, nanoparticles, grains, links, and architected units that interact through contact, entanglement, interlocking, and responsive interfaces. These interactions allow material systems to behave in ways that are difficult to achieve in conventional continuous solids, including switching, locking, flowing, remembering, dissipating energy, morphing shape, and responding to environmental stimuli.

Our research uses geometry and topology as design variables. We ask how the arrangement and connectivity of material units determine collective behavior across length scales, from nanoscale self-assembled lattices to macroscopic architected materials. This perspective connects soft matter, metamaterials, granular materials, nanomaterials, mechanical systems, and robotic materials under a unified framework: physical intelligence in architected matter.

Methodologically, we integrate AI-guided inverse design, computational geometry, multiscale synthesis, additive manufacturing, nanofabrication, mechanical testing, and in situ characterization. Students in the group learn to move between the bench, the printer, the microscope, the mechanical tester, and the computer. Current and future directions include AI-designed material architectures, responsive polycatenated materials, adaptive protection, deployable structures, robotic materials, programmable nanoparticle assemblies, and mechanically intelligent soft devices.

The long-term vision is to create materials that act less like passive objects and more like autonomous physical systems. These materials could enable resilient aerospace structures, soft robots, adaptive wearables, biomedical devices, energy-absorbing systems, and future technologies where intelligence is distributed through matter rather than concentrated only in software or electronics.

Graduate Research Opportunities

Join us to build materials with built-in reflexes.

The Intelligent Matter Lab is recruiting students who want to help define a new field at the intersection of materials science, AI, mechanics, chemistry, and robotics. Our group designs physically intelligent materials: many-particle systems that can adapt, reconfigure, protect, morph, and respond through their own architecture.

Students can work on several connected directions:

AI-designed architected matter: developing computational and machine-learning tools to discover new material architectures with targeted mechanical, acoustic, thermal, optical, or adaptive behavior.

Reflexive and robotic materials: fabricating materials that switch, lock, deploy, dissipate energy, or change shape in response to force, heat, solvent, electric fields, magnetic fields, capillarity, or other stimuli.

Molecular-to-macroscopic programmable matter: building adaptive material systems across scales, from DNA-programmed nanoparticle assemblies to 3D-printed interlocked architectures.

Students in the lab gain hands-on experience in synthesis, fabrication, mechanical testing, microscopy, simulation, data-driven design, and physical modeling. Backgrounds in materials science, chemistry, physics, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, robotics, and applied mathematics are welcome. Prior experience with topology is not required.

We are especially interested in students who are curious, persistent, collaborative, and excited to build new things. A Ph.D. in this group should prepare students not only for academic research, but also for careers in national labs, advanced manufacturing, robotics, aerospace, semiconductor packaging, biomedical devices, startups, and industrial R&D.

Prospective Ph.D. students should apply through MatSE or an affiliated graduate program and email Prof. Zhou at wjz@illinois.edu with a brief description of their interests, relevant experience, and why the lab’s direction is exciting to them.

Research Interests

• AI-Guided Materials Design and Discovery
• Entangled and Programmable Materials
• Topological Mechanics
• Nanoscience and Nanotechnology
• Additive Manufacturing
• Soft and Adaptive Materials
• Metamaterials

Selected Articles in Journals

• Zhou, W., Nadarajah, S., Li, L., Izard, A.G., Prachet, A.K., Patel, P., Yan, H., Xia, X., and Daraio, C., 3D Polycatenated Architected Materials, Science, 2025, 387, 269. [Cover Article]
• Zhou, W.*, Li, Y.*, Partridge, B.E., and Mirkin, C.A., Engineering Anisotropy into Ordered Nanoscale Matter, Chemical Reviews, 2024, 124, 11063-11107.
• Zhou, W.*, Li, Y.*, Je, K., Vo, T., Lin, H.-X, Huang, Z., Partridge, B.E., Glotzer, S.C., and Mirkin, C.A., Space-tiled colloidal crystals from DNA-forced shape-complementary polyhedra pairing, Science, 2024, 383, 312-319.
• Zhou, W., Lim, Y., Lin, H.-X, Lee, S., Li, Y., Lee, S., Huang, Z., Du, J.S., Sanchez-Iglesias, A., Grzelczak, M., Wang, S., Liz-Marzán, L., Glotzer, S.C., and Mirkin, C.A., Colloidal Quasicrystals Engineered with DNA, Nature Materials, 2024, 23, 424-428.
• Li, Y.*, Zhou, W.*, Tanriover, I., Hadibrata, W., Partridge, B.E., Lin, H.-X, Hu, X., Lee, B., Liu, J., Dravid, V.P., Aydin, K., and Mirkin, C.A., Open-Channel Metal Particle Superlattices, Nature, 2022, 611, 695-701.
• Zhou, W., Liu, Z., Huang, Z., Lin, H.-X, Samanta, D., Lin, Q.-Y., Aydin, K., and Mirkin, C.A., Device-Quality, Reconfigurable Metamaterials Formed from the Shape-Directed Assembly of Anisotropic Nanocrystals, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of U.S.A. 2020, 117, 21052.
• Yan, H., Meng, Z., Zhou, W., and Daraio, C., Rigidity Criteria for Chainmail Consisting of Tessellations of Torus Knots, Physical Review Letters, 2025, 135, 088201.