Daryl Yee

Chemistry in Pictures: Eye spy Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN): Keeping you up to date with the chemistry news that matters most. Published by the American Chemical Society.

One of the pictures that we took as part of our recent Adv. Mater. study got featured in @cenmag.bsky.social Chemistry in Pictures!

cen.acs.org/materials/3-...

Beautiful science in a beautiful location.

Woke up to an announcement saying that we’ll be landing in Bilbao shortly.

Which would have been great if I wasn’t flying to San Sebastián…

I used to get that when I was active on Twitter. Can't win them all!

Me too! Our technology is accessible (by research lab and chemistry standards) but not thatttt accessible. Work in progress!

This tremendous effort was led by Yiming Ji, a PhD student in my group. Incredible persistence and great mastery of materials characterization. Truly a tour de force. The work was also supported by Ying Hong, a former postdoc, and Dhruv Bhandari, a summer intern who is now at Cornell.

Fin! (7/7)

There's a lot more in there so do check it out! The SI is a whopping 65 pages, the bulk of which are calculations of our part densities and also that from the literature. Density is vastly underreported in our field, so we hope that this will encourage others to report it moving forward (6/7).

To show the material, size, and geometric versatility of this technology, we made a variety of metal parts and even hard magnets! (5/7)

Some numbers to put this in context:

Average shrinkage values today: ~80%
Average density values today: ~50%

Our work:
Shrinkage values: ~20-40%
Density values: ~90%

(4/7)

With such high metal loadings, we were able to reduce the polymer-to-metal shrinkage while simultaneously increasing part density. These materials now significantly outperform the state of the art (including our previous work!) (3/7)

The trick: we figured out a way to progressively grow inorganic nanoparticles within the hydrogel to achieve extremely high loading of metals (up to 80wt%). We were able to track the growth, which allowed us to obtain some beautiful images of metal dendrite growth within polymers. (Sauron!) (2/7)

Andddd it's now out in Advanced Materials!
doi.org/10.1002/adma...

Here, we show a new method of transforming hydrogels into ceramics and metals with low conversion shrinkages and high material densities. (1/7)

#chemsky #matsky

It's 2025, almost 2026. If you're gonna use chatgpt to write your entire research statement, at least make sure the references are not 100% fake.

Laboratory Openings / Join the Group! PhD/Postdoc Openings Update: 12/09/2025 There is one fully-funded PhD opening in the group in the area of microstructure control during vat photopolymerization or on the fundamentals of crosslinking. ...

We have some new positions available in the group! (PhD student + Research intern)

Details can be found here: www.epfl.ch/labs/alchemy...

#chemsky #matsky

Oooh interesting!

What a beautiful location!

Sigh.

MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025 receives record number of 17,058 proposals This year’s annual MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships call has attracted considerable interest from the research community with 17,058 proposals submitted.

That is a big increase

marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/news/msca-po...

Trying to go to more European conferences = first time in Poland in over 10 years!

Budget cuts come for us all :(

You can print (almost) any kind of structure!

For sure. These are gyroids structures which are bicontinuous. You’ll see the same kind of morphologies from some phase separation

It took 6 months of review but this paper is finally accepted 😮‍💨🫡

It has changed / expanded so much since our first submission. Really excited to to show what we’ve done!

I felt this in my soul.

Engineering: When you need to stir something that is less dense than your solvent.

Oh cool! Welcome to EPFL!

Ooh? You’re joining EPFL?

Hot days (>30C) without AC

We are so back

Guess we ran out of balloons

60 years of independence!

Majulah Singapura 🇸🇬