April 2020: Wenjun (Rebecca) Cai

How do you see your work contributing to the goals and vision of IIHCC?
For any future human-centered community, the interaction between the community and infrastructure unequivocally relates to materials. For any new technology there is a relation to new materials. Within this “new materials” category, we work on structural materials. Metals is a very traditional field; humans learned how to use metals several thousands of years ago. However as of today, there is still so much we do not know about metals. We are at a very exciting stage where, with a data science approach coupled with advanced materials analyzation tools, we can probe things at a scale and environments that we were not able to do in the past. The combination of all these is really driving materials discovery for having more recyclable, lighter-weight, stronger, and more robust metals. These metals are then used for healthcare, for infrastructure, for energy applications, and interaction with humans. So, I contribute to one of the corners of this very big picture.

What other areas outside of your discipline would you entertain for future research and proposal work?
I am interested in the biomedical aspect of metal research. Biomedical implants are something that we have been working on for a few years. One of the technologies we are developing is implantable metal that is also biodegradable. Conventional metals that doctors put in your body when you fracture a bone are either stainless steel or titanium alloys. Once your bones are healed, they have to do a secondary surgery to take it out. The idea is to find a metal that is going to hold the bone for as long as we need and then completely degrade in the body so that secondary surgery is avoided.

Another thing that has drawn my attention lately is the interaction with viruses and metal surfaces, so metal-microbiology interaction. With coronavirus, you might have heard that it lives on different surfaces for different amounts of time. One of the metals that can actually kill and deactivate viruses, including coronavirus, is copper alloy. In order for that to work, you have to corrode copper. The corrosion rate of these metals will have a beneficial or designed efficacy to deactivate or kill viruses.