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Jacob Israelachvili, Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Honorary Doctor of D-MATL, passed away at his home in California on 20th September 2018 after a lengthy illness.

In its role as a pioneering institution, the ETH Zurich aims to try new approaches, broaden horizons, develop new perspectives and thus play its part in ensuring that our country will be able to hold its own on the global stage – and not just in the short term. The Department of Materials is an active part of the future and has contributed or is part of three projects: SynMatLab: Laboratory for Multiscale Materials Synthesis, Materials for Robotics and RobotX: Center for intelligent Machines  

Fused deposition modeling (FDM), often simply referred to as 3D Printing, has been hailed as the future of manufacturing. Researchers at ETH Zürich have developed a bioinspired approach to 3D print recyclable materials using cheap desktop printers that outperform state-of-the-art printed polymers and rival the highest performance lightweight materials. This will finally enable the manufacturing of complex parts that mimic natural structural designs on the mass market.