News

• 2026/04: Our paper, ‘Programmable symmetry-breaking in folded elastic ribbons via tunable pitchfork bifurcations.’, has been published in JMPS.
• 2026/03: Dr. Liu attended the 1st Metamaterials Manufacturing Conference at Birmingham as an invited speaker and presented “Shape-Morphing Metamaterials: From Natural Principles to Functional Structures”.
• 2026/01: Dr. Liu attended the Mechano-X Workshop 2026 at Tsinghua Southeast Asia Center, Bali, Indonesia as an invited speaker and presented “Lessons from Drying Leaves: How Strain Mismatch Drives Folding”.
• 2025/12: Our paper, ‘Rate dependence in granular matter with application to tunable metamaterials.’, has been published in Matter and Highlighted in the Tech Xplore, SciTechDaily, The Engineer, Interesting Engineering, Scienmag, Bioengineer.org, Knowridge, AcademicJobs, and the News of the University of Birmingham.
• 2025/12: Our paper, ‘Inverse elastica: A theoretical framework for inverse design of morphing slender structures.’, has been published in JMPS.
• 2025/12: Our paper, ‘Nematic Design for Shape Morphing.’, has been published in Annu. Rev. Control Robot. Auton. Syst..
• 2025/12: Our paper, ‘Discrete differential geometry for simulating nonlinear behaviors of flexible systems: A survey.’, has been published in EML.
• 2025/11: Dixuan Hu from Tongji University has joined the group as a visiting PhD student. Welcome!
• 2025/11: Dr. Liu has been awarded the 2025 JMPS Best Referee Award.
• 2025/10: Our paper, ‘Midveins regulate the shape formation of drying leaves.’, has been published in JMPS and Highlighted in the News of the University of Birmingham.
• 2025/09: Our paper, ‘Twist-Induced bifurcation and path manipulation in compressed ribbons.’, has been published in JMPS.
• 2025/08: Our paper, ‘Localization of deformation in the central hub of hub-and-spoke kirigami.’, has been published in JMPS.
• 2025/07: Our paper, ‘Harnessing Discrete Differential Geometry: A Virtual Playground for the Bilayer Soft Robotics.’, has been published in Adv. Intell. Syst..
• 2025/07: Dr. Liu has been awarded the Florence Price Award for Outstanding Early-Career Academic at the University of Birmingham Founders’ Awards 2025.
• 2025/06: Our paper, ‘A tutorial on simulating nonlinear behaviors of flexible structures with the discrete differential geometry (DDG) method.’, has been published in Appl. Mech. Rev. and Highlighted in the News of the University of Birmingham.
• 2025/06: Our paper, ‘Real-time simulation enabled navigation control of magnetic soft continuum robots in confined lumens.’, has been published in JMPS.
• 2025/05: Dr. Liu has attended The 31st International Conference on Computational & Experimental Engineering and Sciences (ICCES2025) in Changsha, China and has been awarded the ICCES Outstanding Young Researcher Award.
• 2025/05: Dr. Liu was invited to write a Preview article for Newton.
• 2025/05: Our paper, ‘Achieving symmetric snap-through buckling via designed magnetic actuation.’, has been published in Sci. Adv. and Highlighted in the News of the University of Birmingham.
• 2025/05: Our paper, ‘Localized tension–induced giant folding in unstructured elastic sheets.’, has been published in PNAS and Highlighted in the News of the University of Birmingham.
• 2025/04: Dr. Liu has been awarded the Mike Crisfield Prize for best presentation by UK Association for Computational Mechanics (UKACM).
• 2025/04: Dr. Liu attended the IUTAM Symposium on Data Driven Mechanics at Cambridge as an invited speaker and presented “Mechanics-Aided Machine Learning for the Design of Snap-Actuated Jumping Robots”.
• 2025/04: Our paper, ‘Transient asymmetry during elastic snap-through: The interplay between imperfections and oscillations.’, has been published in Phys. Rev. E.
• 2025/03: Dr. Liu attended the Euromech Colloquium 647 at Glasgow as an invited speaker and presented “Adaptive Folding Matter: From Natural Morphogenesis to Tunable Meta-Ribbons”.
• 2025/03: Dr. Liu has been awarded the Highly Commended for Outstanding Impact by an Early Career Researcher by the University of Birmingham.
• 2025/03: Our paper, ‘Morphing matter: from mechanical principles to robotic applications.’, has been awarded the Most Influential Paper Award in Soft Science.
• 2025/02: Our paper, ‘Inverse Design of Snap-Actuated Jumping Robots Powered by Mechanics-Aided Machine Learning.’, has been published in IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett..
• 2024/10: Our paper, ‘Snap-through eversion of axisymmetric shells under contact indentation.’, has been published in Proc. Royal Soc. A.
• 2024/06: Our paper, ‘Transient amplification of broken symmetry in elastic snap-through.’, has been published in Phys. Rev. Lett. and Highlighted in the News of the University of Birmingham.
• 2024/06: Our paper, ‘Exploiting dynamic bifurcation in elastic ribbons for mode skipping and selection.’, has been published in J Mech. Phys. Solids.
• 2024/05: Our paper, ‘Integration of kinks and creases enables tunable folding in meta-ribbons.’, has been published in Matter and Highlighted in the News of the University of Birmingham.
• 2024/05: Dr. Liu has been selected as a winner of the Young Scientist Support Grant for The 26th International Congress of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (ICTAM 2024) held in Daegu, Korea on August 25-30, 2024.
• 2024/04: Our paper, ‘Dehydration-induced corrugated folding in Rhapis excelsa plant leaves.’, has been published in PNAS and Featured in the This week in PNAS.
• 2024/03: Xinlu Deng from Shanghai Jiaotong University has joined the group as a visiting PhD student. Welcome!
• 2024/02: Our paper, ‘Bio-inspired facile strategy for programmable osmosis-driven shape-morphing elastomer composite structures.’, has been published in Materials Horizons.
• 2024/02: Our paper, ‘Tunable mechanics of architectured composites from particle assemblies.’ has been published in EML and Featured as the Front Cover.
• 2024/02: Dr. Liu has been featured on the News of the University of Birmingham.
• 2023/12: Our paper, ‘Hierarchical Tessellation Enables Programmable Morphing Matter.’, has been published in Matter.
• 2023/11: Dr. Liu has been awarded the prestigious Extreme Mechanics Letters (EML) Young Investigator Award. Congratulations!
• 2023/11: Prof. Burigede Liu from the University of Cambridge visited our group and delivered a talk entitled ‘Towards Quantum Computing in Solid Mechanics’.
• 2023/10: Our paper, ‘Morphing matter: From mechanical principles to robotic applications.’ has been published in Soft Science and Featured as the Front Cover.
• 2023/10: Nan Li from Xi’an Jiaotong University has joined the group as a visiting PhD student. Welcome!
• 2023/09: Qun Zhang has joined the group as a PhD student. Welcome!
• 2023/09: Dr. Liu has finished the PPF position at NTU and moved to University of Birmingham to start the Assistant Professor position since 1st September.
• 2023/08: Our paper, ‘Inverse design and additive manufacturing of shape-morphing structures based on functionally graded composites.’, has been published in JMPS and Highlighted in Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) News.
• 2023/08: Our invited review paper, ‘Modeling and simulation of dynamics in soft robotics: A review of numerical approaches.’, has been published in Curr. Robot. Rep..
• 2023/05: Our paper, ‘Bifurcations and stability analysis of elastic slender structures using static discrete elastic rods method.’, has been published in JAM.
• 2023/04: Our paper, ‘Encoding and storage of information in mechanical metamaterials.’, has been published in Adv. Sci. and Highlighted in Advanced Science News and Featured as the Back Cover.
• 2023/02: Our paper, ‘Modeling of magnetic cilia carpet robots using discrete differential geometry formulation.’, has been published in EML.
• 2023/02: Our paper, ‘A discrete model for the geometrically nonlinear mechanics of hard-magnetic slender structures.’, has been published in EML.
• 2023/01: Our paper, ‘Insect-scale jumping robots enabled by a dynamic buckling cascade.’, has been published in PNAS and Highlighted in TechXplore, University Oxford News and Oxford Mathematical Institute Case Study.
• 2023/01: Dr. Liu has been appointed as the Extreme Mechanics Letters - Early Career Advisory Board (EML-ECAB) member. Congratulations!
• 2022/11: Our paper, ‘Snap-induced morphing: From a single bistable shell to the origin of shape bifurcation in interacting shells’, has been published in JMPS.
• 2022/09: Our paper, ‘Modular multistable metamaterials with reprogrammable mechanical properties’, has been published in Eng Struct.
• 2022/08: Our paper, ‘Shape-morphing structures based on perforated kirigami’, has been published in EML.