Nature’s fine designs

Starting with bacteria and blue-green algae, nature has been busy making things for at least 3.5 billion years. The success and longevity of its processes make biology worth studying as a source of robust designs for new materials, nanotechnologies, and even new approaches to architecture.

“We look at what nature does so nicely, and try to mimic it in the lab,” said Joanna Aizenberg in a Radcliffe Fellows’ lecture Wednesday (Dec. 2).

The Moscow-trained researcher is Harvard’s Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials Science and a pioneering researcher in biomimetics, a branch of science that models new systems and materials on nature.

Read the full article in the Harvard Gazette.