Professor John Biggins

John Biggins is from Sheffield, and first came to Corpus as an undergraduate to read physics. He split his PhD between Corpus and Caltech, before winning an 1851 post-doctoral research fellowship and heading to Harvard. He returned to Cambridge, in the first instance as a Trinity Hall Research Fellow, then as an early career lecturer at the Cavendish. He was recently appointed to a lectureship in applied mechanics by Cambridge Engineering Department, and is pleased to be returning to Corpus as an engineering Fellow.

John's research centers on the theoretical description of soft solids, including rubber, skin, muscle and jelly. He is particularly interested in mechanical instabilities, such as buckling, wrinkling and folding, and in an exciting new category of artificial muscle known as liquid-crystal elastomers. John has also published in a wide range of other fields, including embryology, plasmonics, and the mechanics of chains. He is probably best known for his youtube video explaining the "chain fountain" and his work explaining that the human brain folds into its iconic shape via a buckling instability.

John was recently awarded a prestigious "Future Leaders Fellowship" by UKRI, which will enable him to start a laboratory that fabricates liquid crystal elastomers and deploys them in soft machines.