Xudong Wang, a professor of materials science and engineering at UW-Madison, and his students including study co-first authors Fan Yang and Jun Li, have worked for a long time developing high-performance piezoelectric materials with a focus on flexibility and biocompatibility.

“The challenge we overcame in this work was showing a technique that enables glycine molecules to self-assemble over a very large area, on the wafer scale film structure, with the same orientation,” says Wang. “We’re able to show uniformly high piezoelectric response across the entire film.”