Jeremy Cho (Mechanical Engineering), along with doctoral student Yiwei Gao, authored a paper published in Soft Matter. The paper is titled, "Quantifying the trade-off between stiffness and permeability in hydrogels." The paper is also featured in the Soft Matter Emerging Investigators Series.

Hydrogels—polymeric gel materials used in contact lenses, drug delivery, absorbent diapers, among many other applications—need to be able to permeate water and have mechanical rigidity. This work provides a mathematical scaling law to relate mechanical stiffness to hydraulic permeability. The results of this work provides a simple and succinct understanding of two highly useful properties of an emerging class of materials.