An active Advisory Board members since 2016, P. M. Pelken has been re-appointed at UCL’s Centre for Nature Inspired Engineering CNIE. Amongst others, the centre is working on adaptive material and built environment solutions – with associated extraordinary performance, such as scalability, robustness, material and energy efficiency.
“Evolution over the eons has made nature a treasure trove of clever solutions to sustainability, resilience, and ways to efficiently utilise scarce resources. The Centre for Nature Inspired Engineering at UCL draws lessons from nature to engineer innovative solutions to our grand challenges in energy, water, materials, health, and living space. Rather than imitating nature out of context or succumbing to superficial analogies, research at the Centre is taking a decidedly scientific approach to uncover fundamental mechanisms underlying desirable traits, and apply these mechanisms to design and synthesise artificial systems that hereby borrow the traits of the natural model.”