After injuries derailed his prospects for playing professional soccer, Leon Dimas changed course and is now a PhD student working to create resilient new materials based on natural substances. He and two other MIT graduate students founded MITxplore, an afterschool program for local fifth graders to encourage learning math through experimentation and exploration. In his doctoral research, Dimas creates models that predict the fracture response, fracture resistance, and durability of synthetic materials that arranged their ingredients in various natural and synthetic geometries. Such work could eventually lead to new “metamaterials” that combine nature’s designs with human engineering, resulting in cars or buildings constructed from superstrong synthetic skeletons. Read the full MIT News profile.