Research Expertise and Interest

sustainable design, morphing material mechanisms, ecology, sustainability

Research Description

Lining Yao is an Assistant Professor at the Mechanical Engineering department, the University of California, Berkeley, where she directs the Morphing Matter Lab. Yao is the Zheng-White Berkeley Engineering Faculty Fellow, and serves in the Executive Committee of Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation (JIDI) at UC Berkeley. Yao also has a courtesy appointment in Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute.

Her research explores the positive impact of active and morphing materials on sustainable design across different scales and contexts. Her work focuses on discovering and studying morphing material mechanisms, as well as algorithms for computational design and fabrication pipelines. Dr. Yao has published in both computer science and physical science venues and has received numerous Best Paper or Best Talk Awards and nominations from premier conferences in Human-Computer Interaction. Her journal papers have been featured as cover stories in Nature, Science Advances, and Advanced Materials Technologies. Her work has been widely featured in popular media outlets, including The New York Times, Wired, Scientific American, Fast Company, National Geographic, and BBC, among others. Dr. Yao received her Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab in 2017, and spent her time as a tenure-tracked faculty member at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University before joining UC Berkeley. She is the co-founder of the MorphingMatter4Girls Initiative, a Wired UK fellow, and an appointed instructor in eco-design by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization.