Imagine you have a pile of LEGO blocks. You can snap the blocks together and build anything you want.

The material I am studying, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), is a molecular version of LEGO. Through chemical methods, metal ions and organic molecules can be linked together by chemical bonds, much like LEGO blocks, forming a highly ordered and highly designable structure.

I plan to investigate an even more interesting question: What if we could make this material fold and unfold like origami? What if we could design a material that changes into a desired shape in response to external stimuli, just as a sheet of paper can be folded into different shapes?