Ian works on designing hard-magnetic soft materials where the geometry and the material are chosen together: where to put material, how much magnetic particle it should carry, and which way its remanent magnetization should point. Optimizing any one of those against fixed values of the others finds a worse design than optimizing them jointly, and doing it honestly means settling first on which constitutive description to trust.
That is the order the 2026 manuscript works in: twenty-one pairings of effective shear-modulus relation and strain-energy function, compared first on the actuation problems themselves; then experimental stress-strain data to settle which shear-modulus relation is worth carrying forward; only then the joint optimization. He is its first author, and came to it from undergraduate research in the group.
So far
First author of the 2026 hMSM design manuscript; presented at a national conference. Progressed from undergraduate research to a master's student.