UCL Centre for Nature-Inspired Engineering
The Centre for Nature-Inspired Engineering draws lessons from nature to engineer innovative solutions to our grand challenges in energy, water, materials, health and living space.
Research | Facilities | People | Study | Funding | Join Us | News | Contact Us
At the Centre for Nature-Inspired Engineering (CNIE), we draw lessons from natural systems, materials or processes to engineer innovative technologies to tackle grand challenges in areas such as energy, water, materials, health, and living space. The CNIE was created in 2013 by Professor Marc-Olivier Coppens thanks to a £5M "Frontier Engineering" Award from the EPSRC, one of only five such Awards in the UK. Follow-up funding from the EPSRC was received in 2019, via a “Frontier Engineering: Progression” Award. Since its creation, CNIE has grown into an interdisciplinary hub for innovation at UCL, with collaborators around the globe. The success of the CNIE also led to the launching in 2022 of an MSc programme on Nature-Inspired Solutions.
What is Nature-Inspired Engineering?
What can the structure of the human lung teach us about efficiency, which we can then use to redesign more efficient hydrogen fuel cells in our race to net zero? How can the self-assembling propensity of natural materials underpin the biomanufacture of sustainable alternatives to plastics? How can the branching networks of trees that distribute nutrients throughout their structure inform the design of more efficient chemical reactors? What can interspecies networks underpinning ecosystems teach us about effective supply chains and eliminating waste?
Rather than imitating nature out of context or succumbing to superficial analogies, research at the CNIE takes a decidedly scientific approach to uncover fundamental mechanisms underlying desirable traits from Nature, such as scalability, robustness, material and energy efficiency, and apply them to design and manufacture engineered systems that hereby borrow the traits of the natural model. These systems – water purification membranes, fuel cells, catalysts, adaptive materials, even solutions to cancer immunotherapy – thus become endowed with the same desirable characteristic as their models in nature.
Research Themes
By drawing inspiration from Nature, CNIE researchers address a wide range of problems. Our work stimulates lateral thinking, accelerating not just the solution to a challenge in one area, but also facilitating translation to applications in other areas. The following paper discusses NICE (Nature-Inspired Chemical Engineering) and the nature-inspired solution methodology:
- M.-O. Coppens, Nature-inspired chemical engineering for process intensification. Ann. Rev. Chem. Biomolec. Eng. 12, 187–215 (2021)
Our work can be broadly classified into four themes (T1-T4) corresponding to universal mechanisms underpinning desired properties in nature:
This theme draws inspiration from the way nature bridges microscopic to macroscopic length scales to preserve the intricate microscopic or cellular function throughout (as in trees, the circulatory system, and lungs).
Architects and structural engineers (Paxton, Eiffel or Gaudí) have drawn lessons from mechanical force balancing in nature for centuries. Other areas of engineering have not explored this to the fullest or in the broadest sense, as opportunities down to the nanoscale are tremendous. This theme draws inspiration from the balancing between fundamental physical forces (e.g., electrostatic, polarisation forces) and geometrical confinement, as in protein channels in cell membranes and enzyme folding aided by chaperones.
From bacteria to humans, living organisms self-organise into communities that are much more resilient, adaptive and robust than each organism separately. This theme explores the dimension of time by drawing inspiration from the way fluctuations in nature induce structure (as in natural pattern formation and selection), and the emergence of structures through collective phenomena (as in bacterial communities).
This theme implements network properties and control mechanisms that underpin resilience and adaptability in ecosystems and other natural networks, in applications ranging from catalysis to process intensification, medicine, and the built environment.
Learn more about our application areas. To find out more about our latest discoveries and innovative technologies, please visit the publications lists from the Coppens, Lan and López Barreiro groups.
Our Facilities
The CNIE contains a wide range of equipment including state-of-the-art SAXS/WAXS, Mercury Porosimeter, Gas Sorption Analyser (BET), Dynamic Light Scattering (DLS) and thermal gravimetric analysis with mass spectrometry (TGA-MS). It is located on the second floor and the upper basement of the Roberts Building, Chemical Engineering Department, UCL, Torrington Place, London, WC1E 7JE.
Discover more about our facilities and equipment.
People
Core Team
Prof Marc-Olivier Coppens
CNIE Director / Ramsay Memorial Professor
UCL Profile
Dr Yang Lan
Lecturer in Nature-Inspired Chemical Engineering
UCL Profile
Dr Diego Lopez Barreiro
Lecturer in Nature-Inspired Chemical Engineering
UCL Profile
Dr Matthew Chin
Dr Nidhi Kapil
Dr Xiyi Li
Dr Xinjie Luo
Dr Hamish Mitchell
Dr M. Adil Riaz
Dr Soham Sarkar
Ibrahim Alnutaifi
Mohammed Alsubei
Mohammed Babkoor
Adriana Bernardes
Alexander Birrell
Klara Burdova
Enqi Chen
Ruiyan Gao
Chengzhi Guo
Yiting He
Yixin Li
Maria Mourkou
Ebony Shire
Abby Thompson
Lucy Todd
Gowan Whalley
Jiarui Wu
Zoe Zhuang
Dr Jingyi Wang
Dr Yuanxi Yang
Dr Pengfei Yang
Dr Youxun Xu
Dr Chao Wang
Dr Panagiotis Trogadas
Dr Shuxian Jiang
Dr Linlin Xu
Dr Aleksandra Glowska
Ms Julia Linke
Dr Halan Mohamed
Dr Malica Schmidt
Mr Mohammad Alkhunaizi
Dr Cristian-Renato Boruntea
Dr Shuman Xu
Dr Yanan Liu
Dr Sasank (Viswanath) Bethapudi
Dr Haiyue Yu
Dr Guanghua Ye
Dr Lilian de Martín
Dr Jayesh Bhatt
Dr Michael Nigra
Dr Ayomi Perera
Dr L. Silo Meoto
Dr Victor Francia
Dr Zheyi Meng
Dr Cheng Lian
Dr Jason Cho
Dr Tobias Weissenberger
Dr Jianan Li
Dr Kaiqiao Wu
Gaiya Ibrahim
Dr Michele Lynch
Dr Katarzyna Maksimiak
Funding and Partnerships
Our work would not be possible without the generous contributions of our funding agencies, industrial collaborators and donors. We are always open to new collaboration opportunities, so please get in touch with us if you are interested in working with the CNIE. Our work has received funding from:
EPSRC, BBSRC, Royal Society, Innovate UK, Industry, Cancer Grand Challenges (CRUK, NCI and the Mark Foundation) for the NexTGen project and philanthropic donors, sponsoring PhDs and postdoctoral researchers.
Entrepreneurship
The research developed at CNIE has a highly entrepreneurial character. Some examples of spin outs stemming from CNIE research involve:
“Aerograft” dental materials. Patent portfolio (inventors: Niall Kent and Marc-Olivier Coppens) were licensed through UCL Business. Related to this, former CNIE postdoctoral researcher Dr Niall Kent won the first RAEng Launchpad Award and UCL Enterprise & Innovation Early Career Award (2019), CNIE PhD alumna Dr L. Silo Meoto was a Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) Enterprise Fellow (2017) to support the development of the materials.
LION Software (founded by Lucy Todd, PhD student with Marc-Olivier Coppens): online data visualisation software and professional development
Join Us
There are multiple funding opportunities available for postdocs and PhD students. If you would like to apply to any of this funding schemes, please reach out and we will discuss supporting options.
Postdoctoral researchers
You can find general information about funding options on the UCL website.
Specific funding schemes include:
- Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships
- Branco Weiss Fellowship
- Wellcome Trust Fellowship
- Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship
- EPSRC postdoctoral fellowship
- BBSRC Fellowship scheme
- Royal Society Newton International Fellowships
- Schmidt Science fellowship
- 1851 research fellowship
- Swiss National Science Foundation
- L’Oréal-UNESCO Women in Science Rising Talents
PhD students
Information about general PhD funding can be found on the UCL website. Specific funding schemes include:
CNIE News
Lucy Todd won best poster award for her new work published in Computers and Chemical Engineering.
12 May 2025
Our latest paper on water electrolysis technologies is published in Energy & Environmental Science
06 May 2025
A new PhD vacancy at Prof. Coppens’ NICE Group
30 Apr 2025
Contact Us
Centre for Nature-Inspired Engineering (CNIE)
Department of Chemical Engineering
University College London
Torrington Place
London
WC1E 7JE
Contact the CNIE team
Click to email. cnie.admin@ucl.ac.ukContact Us
Equipment and Facilities enquiries:
Dr Han Hu
Research Laboratories Manager
Click to email. han.wu@ucl.ac.uk Click to call. +44 (0)20 7679 0491
