Yuhang Hu, Assistant Professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, has been named a recipient of the 2019 Extreme Mechanics Letters (EML) Young Investigator Award for a paper entitled, “Indentation adhesion of hydrogels over a wide range of length and time scales.” Dr. Hu’s paper discusses the importance of measuring hydrogel adhesion at multiple time and length scales to gain a more accurate understanding of the hydrogel’s interfacial properties. Hydrogels are soft and often interface with other rigid materials to form devices such as soft actuators, sensors, soft robots, wearable electronics and many others. Therefore knowing the bonding strength and mechanisms of hydrogels with other materials is crucial.

Dr. Hu Joined the Woodruff School and the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech in August 2018. Prior to that, Dr. Hu was an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2015 to 2018, where she received the NSF CAREER award and AFOSR Young Investigator Award. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in the area of Solid Mechanics and worked in the area of Materials Chemistry as a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard from 2011 to 2014.

Dr. Hu’s research focuses on the mechanics of soft active materials such as stimuli-responsive gels, soft biological tissues, and bio-inspired interfacial materials. Her exploratory research includes poroelasticity, coupled deformation and chemical reaction, and multi-scale contact of soft wet materials.

The 5th Extreme Mechanics Letters (EML) Young Investigator Award is provided by Elsevier to honor the best paper by a young scientist which has been published in volumes 13-22 EML from 2018 to 2019.

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation, United States under Grant No. 1554326. YH also acknowledges the funding support from Air Force Office of Scientific Research, United States under award no. FA9550-17-1-0295 (Dr. B.-L. “Les” Lee, Program Manager).