[1] Daraio's research develops new materials that combine intriguing chemical composition with a designed architecture at the micro- and macro-scales.
Some of her contributions include a version of Newton's cradle that can generate "sound bullets"—sound waves focused tightly enough to disrupt matter;[2][3] walls filled with ball bearings that can pass sound in only one direction;[4][5] 3d-printed self-assembling rolling robots;[6] solar panels for space missions made of a shape-memory polymer that unfolds in sunlight;[7] and heat-sensitive artificial skin made out of pectin for both robotic and prosthetic uses[8].
[1] Her dissertation, Design of materials: Configurations for enhanced phononic and electronic properties, was jointly supervised by Professors Sungho Jin and Vitali F.
[9] She joined the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) faculty in 2006, and has remained there since with a leave from 2013 to 2016, to take a chair of Mechanics and Materials at ETH Zurich.
Daraio also won the Felice De Carli Medal of the Italian Metallurgical Society in 2006,[11] and the Richard von Mises Prize of the Gesellschaft für Angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik in 2008.