TOPICS

NextGenMaterials explores cutting-edge advancements shaping the future of materials science. The conference covers life-emulating materials, such as engineered living materials that utilize living cells as biological factories, and quasi-living systems – artificial materials inspired by nature that can autonomously respond to their environment. Another topical focus is on programmable materials that change properties in response to stimuli, enabling self-assembly, adaptation, and repair, and metamaterials with innovative internal structures that enable unique properties. Finally, the topic of materials design methods emphasizes design through advanced tools like machine learning, multiscale simulations, and high-performance computing. By integrating these technologies with high-throughput experiments, researchers accelerate discovery and unlock the full potential of next-generation materials. With the challenges addressed being highly interdisciplinary contributions from communities across materials science, computer science and electronic, chemical, mechanical engineering, and robotics are welcome. In line with the conference topics, scientific contributions in three distinct tracks are invited:

• NextGen Life-Emulating Materials
  • Engineered Living Materials
    Engineered Living Materials (ELMs) are hybrid materials that contain living cells as functional components that either construct or assemble the material’s structure themselves or influence its functional performance. What sets ELMs apart from other biohybrid systems is that the living cells act as responsive biological factories, using energetic resources from their environment to produce biopolymeric building blocks to form or maintain a material with adaptive properties. Engineering of ELMs can take various forms, such as programming biofactories with sensory capabilities, programming the composition, morphology and properties of the inert organic or inorganic matrix, integrating reporting systems to monitor dynamic material’s performance, and vascularization concepts to maintain long-term function. . We look forward to contributions from the emerging ELM community showing new materials with unprecedented functions.
  • Quasi-living Materials Systems
    Quasi-living Materials Systems are artificial, non-living materials systems inspired by nature. The systems can adapt autonomously to their environment, harvest clean energy from it, and be insensitive to damage or recover from it. Such quasi-living materials systems could meet society’s demands for future-oriented environmental and energy technologies. Research into the acceptance and social relevance of these autonomous systems and their sustainability are thus important components of development. Therefore, a broad spectrum of contributions from materials science, energy research, biomimetics and microsystems engineering as well as sustainability research are invited to this track.
• NextGen Adaptive Materials
  • Mechanical and Functional Metamaterials
    Functional Metamaterials are artificial, architected materials, which offer unique properties superior to the underlying bulk material. This novel class of materials is defined by an internal structure with a characteristic length that is smaller than those of relevant phenomena, e.g., wavelengths or localization bands. The rationally designed structure enables tailored properties to create new opportunities for applications in, e.g., the mobility, health, and energy sectors. Mechanical metamaterials, i.e., ultralight materials with programmable linear and nonlinear features of the mechanical behavior, have been realized by advanced manufacturing technologies. In this track latest research throughout all material classes – from classical metallic up to bioengineered or even biological materials are addressed. Beyond mechanical and functional properties, damage-tolerance, i.e., resilience of the structures is of great relevance.
  • Programmable Materials
    Programmable Materials are next-generation materials engineered to change their properties, shape, or behavior in response to user input, autonomous sensing or specific stimuli, such as temperature, light, magnetic fields, or chemical signals. These materials are designed with embedded functionality, allowing them to adapt, self-assemble, or even repair themselves in dynamic environments. Topics of this track will include, but are not limited to, underlying molecular or mesoscopic architecture, mechanisms and programming elements, system implementation, and system design and integration. Therefore, contributions from communities across materials science, computer science and electronics, chemical, mechanical and robotics engineering are invited.
• NextGen Materials Design Methods
  To exploit the full potential of NextGen Materials, new pathways for materials design, that consider sustainability and eco-friendly designs, must be taken This requires advanced tools like multiscale modeling and simulation and machine learning to predict forward process-structure-property. High-performance computing, including powerful hardware and scalable resources, supports these processes. This way, the integration of high-throughput simulation and experiments will enable innovative inverse design algorithms to accelerate materials discovery and ensure validation and refinement. As success depends on interdisciplinary expertise, this track invites contributions from materials science, physics, chemistry, and data science.