Designing dynamic and non-equilibrium materials

Despite significant advances in synthetic materials design, the complexity of living matter dwarfs what is presently achievable in artificial materials. Biological systems achieve these feats by precisely controlling dynamic and out-of-equilibrium properties, suggesting that it should be possible to achieve the same, or possibly better, control in synthetic materials. But how do we design complex functional materials without the luxury of billions of years of evolution? In this talk, I propose a roadmap composed of two strategies to address this question: (1) identifying systems with tunable interactions and (2) developing methods to search the vast design space of these interactions. Towards this goal, I introduce a method for materials design that leverages differentiable simulation to target dynamic and non-equilibrium functions in self-assembled materials.