Academic Profile : Faculty

Prof Wang_Yifan.JPG picture
Asst Prof Wang Yifan
Nanyang Assistant Professor, School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
Dr. Wang is a Nanyang Assistant Professor at the School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research interests focus on design and manufacturing new classes of robotic materials with unprecedented capabilities of sensing, responding to and communicating with their surrounding environment, by incorporating soft matter building blocks such as granular particles, colloids and nanoparticles. The applications of Dr. Wang’s research extend from smart fabrics for exoskeleton and haptic perception, microscale shape-changing robots, to active phononic metamaterials. Dr. Wang obtained his bachelor’s degree in physics from Peking University, China in 2011, and PhD degree in physics from the University of Chicago, USA in 2016. Dr. Wang worked as a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Department of Mechanical and Civil Engineering, California Institute of Technology, USA from 2017 to 2020. He joined NTU MAE in December, 2020 as Nanyang Assistant Professor.

He has published papers in top research journals including Nature, Matter, Nature Materials, Physical Review Letters, Nano Letters, ACS Nano, Advanced Materials, Small, Extreme Mechanics Letters, etc. He has won numerous awards such as Grainger Foundation Fellowship in Experimental Physics, and Nanyang Assistant Professorship Award. His work has been widely covered by global media sources.
Soft robotics and soft matter
Exoskeletons and assistive devices
Mechanical metamaterials
Smart sensing interfaces
Additive manufacturing
 
  • Untethered Jammable Robotic Structures Driven by Electrochemical Pneumatic Batteries
  • Design and Additive Manufacturing of Robotic Metamaterials with Embodied Intelligence
  • Mechanical Properties of Micro-Architected Materials
  • Developing Soft Robotic Materials from Engineered Particles