Murphy’s law: Make materials with biology in mind
As an undergraduate student majoring in physics at Illinois Wesleyan University, William Murphy took exactly one biology course: Biology 101.
Two decades later, he’s built a career around creating what he calls “bio-inspired” materials such as tissues for drug modeling and bone regeneration. Murphy, the Harvey D. Spangler Professor of biomedical engineering and orthopedics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, looks to nature for insights on his designs.
“I didn’t start doing anything biomedical until I was in graduate school,” he says. “And so I think that order of things—starting in physics and materials science and then encountering biology—was helpful. Biology became an inspiration for how I wanted to build materials.”