On December 7, 2025, we were honored to host Prof. Martin Mwangi Thuo from the Department of Materials Science & Engineering at North Carolina State University and Deputy Director of the NSF-STC Center for Complex Particle Systems (COMPASS). Prof. Thuo delivered an invited lecture titled “On Liquid Metals: From Heat-Free Solder to Tunable Bandgap Materials.”

Prof. Thuo is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (FNAI) and the African Academy of Sciences (FAAS). He has made influential contributions in soft electronics, surface thermodynamics, liquid metal chemistry, and frugal innovation. He holds more than 70 patents worldwide and has published over 100 papers. He previously held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard University under Prof. George M. Whitesides and has received numerous awards, including the ACS Nano Rising Star Award and the Schafer 2050 Professorship.

In his talk, Prof. Thuo introduced his group's recent advances in leveraging the interfacial thermodynamics of liquid metals to realize heat-free soldering, printable conductive inks, multi-metal organometallic assemblies, and tunable bandgap materials. By engineering nanoscale oxide shells, his team developed metal particles capable of significant undercooling, enabling direct writing on soft and textured substrates. He also highlighted a living-polymerization–driven route to high-aspect-ratio organometallic nanomaterials and their potential applications in catalysis and low-cost microelectronics.

Prof. Thuo’s visit sparked lively discussions and provided valuable insights into emerging opportunities in liquid-metal-based materials research. We look forward to potential collaborations with his group in the future.