Fernandez-Rico Group

Soft and Biofabricated Materials

Living systems have the remarkable ability to build materials with an exquisite level of structural control. From beautifully colored bird feathers to mechanically robust structures in marine shells, biological materials emerge through growth, secretion, and self-organization of microscopic building blocks. Moreover, many of these materials are built from abundant resources, under ambient conditions and without specialized manufacturing machinery. Understanding how microscopic processes give rise to material structure across length scales, and how to reproduce this control sustainably and at scale, is a central challenge at the interface of soft matter physics, biology and materials science.

The Fernández-Rico Group investigates how order, structure and function emerge in soft materials made of anisotropic building blocks. We combine experiments, quantitative microscopy and image analysis to study systems ranging from passive colloids and fibers to biofabricated materials produced by microorganisms. Our group explores how particles self-assemble, how phase separation can be harnessed to create architected materials, and how living systems organize the matter they produce. A central goal is to uncover physical principles that connect microscopic interactions to macroscopic material properties. By working with scalable materials and fabrication routes inspired by biology, we aim to contribute to the development of robust and sustainable materials for the future.