HARVARD
Materials Research Science and Engineering Center
 
 
 
Graduate Student

Jianyu Li
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Jianyu Li is a third-year Ph.D. student at Harvard. He comes from China, and graduated from Zhejiang University with a bachelor's degree in Polymer Science. He spent one year studying at University of Hong Kong, where he studied the relaxation behavior of polymeric materials under high temperature by nanoindentation technique in the laboratory of Prof. A.H.W. Ngan. At Harvard, under the guidance of Prof. Joost Vlassak and Prof. Zhigang Suo, Jianyu continues to study mechanical properties of hydrogels, by developing new theoretical models and experimental approaches. One main project is studying experimental characterization of equations of state for ideal elastomeric gels; various approaches have been proposed and validated; the general and robust protocol is proved to be applicable for different material systems, such as rubber, neutral hydrogels and polyelectrolyte hydrogels. This work benefits from a collaboration of Prof. David Weitz's group and the access of various experimental instruments funded by MRSEC. Other research is to use indentation technique to characterize inelastic behavior of biopolymer hydrogels; to improve the performance of hybrid gels in stiffness and toughness, under a collaboration with Prof. David Mooney's group. Along with the research, Jianyu is committed to sports and teaching, and serving as a Teaching Fellow at Harvard.