Lining Yao

This just in: The Winter 2025 issue of Berkeley Engineer can be found at newsstands across UC Berkeley! 🗞️ Can't make it to campus? We also put the whole magazine online: engineering.berkeley.edu/magazine

Had an inspiring day at Stanford. Thanks for hosting @HariSubramonyam! I got to catch up with some of my favorite people on campus @dSeanMustard @landay, and talked to some very energetic students. hci.stanford.edu/seminar/speake…

Salon Talk on "Cellulosic Self-Shaping: From Body to Building" by Tiffany Cheng, Assistant Professor at Cornell University. This is also a guest lecture for MECENG 292C: Design with Morphing Materials and Mechanisms. Public live stream available! morphingmatter.org/salon/guest-le…

AI and designers collaboratively design shape morphing bots that run, turn, morph, and manipulate, from a quadruped robot to morphing helmet. Check out our newly published work at @NatureComms. engineering.berkeley.edu/news/2025/09/m… @UCBerkeley @Cal_Engineer @BerkeleyME

Overjoyed and beyond proud of Tianyu @TianyuSkai -his very first year as a PhD student at UC Berkeley, and already he has won a Best Paper Award at one of the world’s most prestigious HCI conferences, for work born of his own vision and dedication. Presenting at #UIST2025

Morphing Matter course, offered as an advanced design topic @UCBerkeley @Cal_Engineer @BerkeleyME is among these: news.berkeley.edu/2025/08/29/fro…

@ProfBuehlerMIT love the work!

Often, AI generates in silico designs without a manufacturable path & novel materials fail to be actually produced in the lab. In new work we address this weakness with a model that produces both design principles and manufacturing strategies. Using our fine-tuned BioinspiredLLM, agentic workflows & hierarchical reasoning (divergent generation followed by convergent evaluation/refinement) our algorithm mines literature across plant science, biomimetics and materials engineering - to extract structure-property relationships and turns them into hypotheses and lab procedures. Focusing on humidity-responsive systems such as pollen and Rhapis excelsa, we generated and evaluated hundreds of hypotheses from a single query, translating biological mechanisms into tractable material designs with clear manufacturing instructions. We then test the predictions by fabricating a pollen-based adhesive with tunable morphology and measured shear strength, showing that AI-predicted behavior can accelerate real-world materials discovery and enable effective human-AI collaboration. Nice work with our experimental partners led by Nam-Joon Cho at @NTUsg, Subra Suresh and Ming Dao! R. Luu, J. Deng, M. Ibrahim, NJ Cho, M. Dao, S Suresh, M.J. Buehler, Generative Artificial Intelligence Extracts Structure-Function Relationships from Plants for New Materials, arXiv 2508.06591v1, 2025

101 of Morphing Matter in 101 seconds. by @UCBerkeley @berkeley @Cal_Engineer @BerkeleyME Morphing matter is an intellectual playground, one that sits at the intersection of science, design and nature. news.berkeley.edu/2025/07/03/ins…

After 3.5 years at @MorphingMatLab , Qiuyu (Luca) Lu @Dr_Qiuyu is moving on to an exciting next step in his career - professorship! What will be your lab name? See his instrumental work: morphingmatter.org/member/qiuyu-lu

Congrats team from @Cal_Engineer

@ShuYangPenn @PennEngineers Well deserved!

I am incredibly honored and @PennEngineers provides me a platform to interact and collaborate on Penn campus and beyond.

Qiuyu Lu @Dr_Qiuyu gave a lab tour during the #BerkeleyME's Alumni Event. #MEgaGive

@jrivnay @Rainmaker1973 Time to drill!

@Rainmaker1973 👀@lining_yao 😲

The "Erodium Copy" robot.

@epaulos Have been always wanting to visit the OtherLab. Enjoy the talk!

TONIGHT - join me at the OtherLab in SF for a talk as part of the BayCHI series - Plastic Dynamism: Encountering and Designing with Emerging Technologies baychi.org/calendar/20241…

Giving two invited talks at #F24MRS. Programmable Degradation (SB11.03.01) and Hygromorphic Wood Actuators (SB03.08.01), both as examples of Sustainable Morphing Matter. mrs.org/meetings-event… @Dr_Qiuyu @BerkeleyME @Cal_Engineer

Participating in Singapore Design Week 2024

Hosted by @PrernaRavi1 and @formanfunction, our diversity chairs at #UIST2024, we talked about work, mentoring, life, identity, and my little five-month old girl, in the Women's Lunch panel. Sharing the stage with Wendy Mackay, Mira Dontcheva,@amypavel @alexiiion @parastooabtahi

Degrade to Function: This concept challenges the conventional view of degradation as merely an end-of-life process, aiming to create eco-friendly and self-contained morphing devices that operate through a sequence of environmentally-triggered degradations.

In nature, one life ends when another begins. Material degradation becomes functional repurpose and upgrade, mediating natural ecology. A new project from @MorphingMatLabled by @Dr_Qiuyuand Semina Yi, @BerkeleyME @Cal_Engineer @UCBerkeley morphingmatter.org/projects/dtf

Enormous & fun banquet at #UIST2024 huge kudos to local super chair @hciprof and general chairs @mynkgoel @lining_yao and great keynote Yaser Sheikh (@subail )