Max Tepermeister

Papers

Total Citations

H-Index

About

Max Tepermeister is pioneering the emerging field of **soft ionics**, a paradigm that moves beyond traditional solid-state electronics by harnessing mobile ions within soft, polymer-based materials. His foundational review, "Soft Ionics: Governing Physics and State of Technologies" (2022, 21 citations), serves as a critical roadmap for the field, outlining how these materials can enable a new generation of functional devices that are not limited to electrons and holes. Tepermeister’s work directly tackles two grand challenges: creating responsive materials and designing complex ionic circuits. In "Regulating hydrogel mechanical properties with an electric field" (2025, 4 citations), he demonstrates a novel method to dynamically control the stiffness of hydrogels, a breakthrough for soft robotics and adaptive tissues. Most notably, his research on "Harnessing ionic complexity" (2025, 2 citations) introduces a hierarchical modeling approach to design soft ionic circuitry—materials that can sense, process information, and respond autonomously. By providing the design principles for these "ionic semiconductors," Tepermeister is laying the groundwork for entirely soft control systems, moving us closer to active materials that blur the line between device and organism.