Abstract

Breakthroughs in fundamental research now allow unprecedented control of materials at the molecular level, enabling a wide range of exquisite 3D structures to be assembled through a bottom-up approach. Simultaneously, developments in 3D fabrication technologies are heralding completely new and disruptive ways to control the 3D form of a rapidly growing range of materials, from hard metals, to transparent polymers, and soft biopolymers and gels, and at feature sizes from nano through micro and meso scale. Bringing this dynamically expanding knowledge base together thus will allow us, for the first time, to build devices and platforms whose form we can control over this tremendous diversity of scale. I believe this has profound implications for science and society, leading to, for example, completely new chem/bio-sensing concepts that could revolutionise how we monitor personal health, the quality of water and air, biopharma manufacturing processes, and food production.