We're thrilled to celebrate Laboratory University Collaboration Initiative (LUCI) Fellow, Dr. Anesia Auguste, PhD and her team at the Air Force Research Laboratory, in collaboration with Texas A&M University and supported by the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering LUCI Program, on a remarkable breakthrough. They've developed a way to program exactly how a "smart" material bends, stiffens, and morphs into complex 3D shapes, all using a single flash of patterned light. 
For years, building these shape-shifting liquid crystal elastomers meant slow, piece-by-piece fabrication. This new method collapses that into one programmable step, opening up exciting new possibilities for stretchable electronics, adaptive optics, and conformable hardware that can bend around a wing or fold itself into shape.
This achievement reflects a tremendous collaborative effort, led by co-first authors Jared Gibson and Asaf Dana. Congratulations to Dr. Anesia Auguste, Jared Gibson, Asaf Dana, Taylor Ware (corresponding author), Sahana Dhananjayan, Manivannan Sivaperuman Kalairaj, Yoo Jin Lee, Kyle Carothers, and Hilmar Koerner on this incredible advance.
This is exactly the kind of bold, foundational research that makes us proud to support the next generation of scientific discovery!
Read the work in Macromolecules here: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.macromol.6c00998