Aurimas Narkevicius

Nature is awesome, isn’t it, but it’s not as idyllic as it’s often portrayed. Nature constantly challenges all the organisms in their fight for living with only the best adapted ones managing to survive. The triumphant ones often manage that by optimising the materials and their properties by constructing hierarchical architectures, which is achieved despite a limited selection of the building blocks. One of the most common building blocks found in nature is an apparently simple polymer known as chitin. The most diverse family of organisms, known as Arthropoda, exemplifies many “success” stories with fabulously adapted spiders, crabs, insects, and many more organisms, which inspire us, the human, to strive for more sustainable and functional materials via principles of hierarchical architecture of simple building blocks.

As you probably can tell already, my research interests encompass two highly related yet different aspects:

• Understanding the fundamentals of hierarchical assembly of material in nature
• Manufacturing sustainable and functional materials based on the principles used in nature

During my PhD (2016 - 2021), I concentrated on exploring and developing artificial chitin-based materials in the Bio-inspired Photonics group (University of Cambridge). However, in order to be true to my research interests, I wanted to also study the fundamental principles behind the assembly of chitin in nature. Therefore, I joined the Politi group (TU Dresden) as a postdoctoral researcher to work with the best in the field.

Powered by exuberance, I am looking forward to seeing what the science of hierarchical materials made of simple building blocks like chitin will teach us.