Prof. Zuankai Wang is currently Chair Professor of Nature-Inspired Engineering in
the Department of Mechanical
Engineering at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) and concurrently serves
as Associate Vice President
(Research & Innovation). Professor Wang received his B.S. degree from Jilin
University in 2000, M.S. degree from
the Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of
Sciences, in 2003, and a
Ph.D. degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2008. After a one-year
postdoctoral training at Columbia University,
he joined the City University of Hong Kong (CityU) as Assistant Professor in 2009
and was promoted to Chair Professor in 2021.
He was the Associate Dean of the College of Engineering from 2019 to 2022 and the
founding Deputy Director of
the Research Centre for Nature-Inspired Engineering from 2021 to 2022 at CityU. He
is currently the Executive
Editor-in-Chief of Droplet journal (Wiley), and Associate Editor and Advisory Board
Member for ten journals
(Langmuir, Advanced Engineering Materials, iScience, Journal of Bionic Engineering,
and others).
Professor Wang is a founding member of the Hong Kong Young Academy of Sciences,
Croucher Senior Research Fellow (2023),
RGC Senior Research Fellow (2022), Highly Cited Researcher (Cross-field) recognized
by Clarivate (2022),
Fellow of the International Society of Bionic Engineering, and Changjiang Chair
Professor conferred by
Ministry of Education of China (2016). His work has been recognized by the Guinness
Book of World Records and
two inventions have won the International Exhibition of Inventions of Geneva Gold
Medal and Gold Medal with
Congratulations of Jury, respectively. He has received many awards including the
BOCHK Science and Technology
Innovation Prize (2022), Green Tech Award (2021), Xplorer Prize (2020), Hall of Fame
(Advanced Engineering
Materials, 2019), 35th World Cultural Council Special Recognition Award (2018).
A defining feature of living organisms lies in their efficient use of surfaces to
dynamically interface with
environments for a continuous flux and exchange of water, energy, heat, and
information. The ubiquity and diversity
of these elegant natural surfaces construct the Surface of Things (SOT),
reminiscence of In the Internet of
Things (IOT) which has received vast attention and widely penetrated into our daily
life. Despite extensive progress,
particularly triggered by learning from nature, the power and magic of natural
surfaces evade our deep scrutiny,
and it also appears challenging to design, manufacture and adopt artificial SOTs
that exhibit high performances
as their natural counterparts. The challenges originate from the complexity in
adopting one surface design to
resolve many seemingly contradictory properties to yield optimized functions for
many practical applications,
especially in harsh environments.
In this talk, I will reveal intriguing property-function relationships on natural
surfaces and then design,
manufacture nature-inspired SOT with tailored complementary properties in
topography, wetting, thermal/electrical
conductivity, stiffness to overcome the inherent tradeoff otherwise associated with
homogeneous design for
water, energy, environment and healthcare applications.