Principal Investigator Benedetto Marelli
Biomaterials for Boosting Food Security and Materials Circularity
Analytics Tools to Improve Sustainability of Global Wood Supply Chains
Benedetto Marelli Paul M. Cook Career Development Professor, Associate Professor of Civil, and Environmental Engineering, MIT CEE
Benedetto Marelli Paul M. Cook Career Development Professor, Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, MIT CEE
Structural biopolymers are materials engineered by Nature as building blocks of living matter. These materials have unique and compelling properties that allow for their assembly and degradation with minimal energy requirements as well as their performance at the biotic/abiotic interface. By combining basic material principles with advanced fabrication techniques, it is possible to define new strategies to drive the assembly of structural biopolymers in advanced materials with unconventional forms and functions such as edible coating for perishable food, inkjet prints of silk fibroin that change in color in the presence of bacteria, three dimensional monoliths that can be heated by exposure to infrared light and flexible keratin-made photonic crystals.