Carnegie Mellon University senior Ashley Burbano had glowing results in her summer research into understanding the applications of a material that lights up when stimulated.
A student in the College of Fine Arts studying design, Burbano has handled a wide variety of materials in her work designing costumes for fashion shows and other wearable artwork. This summer, though, she's applying science to her sewing.
As part of a summer project at the Morphing Matter Lab in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in CMU's School of Computer Science, Burbano experimented with a soft elastomeric composite material, which luminates, or glows, when mechanical force is applied to it. Her research is funded through a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) grant from the Office of Undergraduate Research.
The Morphing Matter Lab focuses on computational design and hands-on experimentation of responsive materials and how they can react to the environment and human behaviors.
"What drew me to the research specifically was the combination of science and fashion," Burbano said.
She was tasked with exploring different techniques of using the glowing material to demonstrate how the coated fibers in fashion garments responded to the movement of the human body and other applied forces, like the stretching a fabric would undergo in normal everyday wear to understand potential future applications of the fabric.