Earth-based materials, much like living organisms, have evolved over millions of years, developing distinctive mechanical and transport properties through nature's architected design. Their microscopic structure governs critical functions, including soil stability, carbon sequestration, groundwater storage, and nutrient delivery. How does nature engineer soil with specific mechanical and transport properties? Addressing this fundamental (but broad) question will enable the development of design principles for meta-soil: engineered, sustainable soil matter with tailored adaptive resilience and environmental transport properties.
Over the 50+ years since Philip Anderson's landmark essay More is Different, the study of emergent dynamics in hierarchical systems has become central to condensed matter physics and biophysics. Yet in this era of nature-inspired solutions, the most abundant and complex material on Earth, the soil beneath our feet, remains largely unexplored. My lab adapts the emergence framework, previously applied to biological cell and polymer physics, to program assembly, dynamics, and transport in engineered soils.
Toward this goal, we synthetically reconstitute hierarchical soil structures: deconstructing the multiscale mechanics of natural soil materials, rebuilding them with minimally complex laboratory analogs, and uncovering how microscale material properties control macroscale mechanics and transport. A guiding principle of our geomimicry-based approach is the multiscale link between microscopic material assembly, mesoscale structural signatures, and the novel emergent mechanics and transport that arise at the macroscale.
