COST Action · Intelligent soft materials
INFORMat unites chemists, physicists, materials scientists and engineers across Europe to build soft materials that sense, decide, signal and move on their own. Intelligent materials emerge where three disciplines overlap. Select one to see how it feeds the core.
Kick-off 1 Nov 2026
Action Monitor
How the network is growing against its year-one commitments, and where we are on the four-year deliverable roadmap. The figures are public by design.
Find your way in
Bring your lab into SENSE, DECIDE, TALK, MOVE or IMPACT and shape the shared roadmap.
How to join PhD students & early-careerTalent NetworkMentoring, the Young Talent Prize, retreats and a real voice in how the Action runs.
For young researchers MobilityGrants & missionsFunded research visits, conference grants and virtual mobility, with priority for ITC researchers.
See grant types Industry & publicPartner with usCo-create use-cases, join expert workshops, or use our open teaching and outreach materials.
Ways to engageThe challenge
Stimuli-responsive materials follow a simple if-then logic: change the temperature or pH and they switch. The missing ingredient is the one that underpins all biological life, embedded feedback control. INFORMat integrates chemical reaction networks directly within and upon soft material interfaces.
Working groups
Four scientific working groups map onto the closed loop of an intelligent material. A fifth, IMPACT, carries the Action into education, industry and society.
Develop chemical sensors that detect specific or combined cues such as pH, ionic strength, light, temperature, gradients and mechanical stress. Reliable sensing at low concentrations, and coupling of different stimuli, needs new materials, new chemistry and the links between them.
Build the chemical capability for local information processing and decision-making. Reaction networks show behaviour from bistability and oscillation to history-dependent decisions; kinetic modelling and automated platforms help embed them in materials that pattern, remember and choose.
Develop chemical signal cascades embedded in soft materials that transmit information autonomously. Like a flock of birds or the arms of an octopus, coordination needs sending, receiving and interpreting signals in a noisy environment.
Develop soft actuators whose motion is controlled by chemical feedback. Designing for feedback lets simpler actuators perform richer, directional motion in time and space through chemo-mechanical and mechano-chemical coupling.
Grow the network, drive consortium grants and policy work, run the annual event, lead public engagement, and build an EU-wide open-education framework for a field that has no unified curriculum yet.
Grants & mobility
Every grant runs through COST’s e-COST system and follows the COST Annotated Rules. About half of the training, networking and mobility budget is set aside for researchers from Inclusiveness Target Countries, women and young researchers.
Funded research visits to a lab, company or user facility in another participating country, to learn a technique, run experiments or start a collaboration.
Support for PhD candidates and early-career investigators to present INFORMat work at an international conference.
Reserved for researchers based in Inclusiveness Target Countries presenting INFORMat-related work at conferences not organised by the Action.
Small grants for online collaboration: building shared datasets and protocols, organising remote workshops, or developing teaching material.
INFORMat Talent Network
PhD students and young researchers get their own governance, activities and budget inside the Action. Almost half of the founding proposers are young researchers.
News & events
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Governance
A Management Committee steers the Action, supported by seven committees and the Talent Network. At least half of all leadership roles go to women and researchers from Inclusiveness Target Countries.
The Management Committee elects the Action’s leadership at the kick-off meeting on 1 November 2026. Names appear here after the vote.
Open throughout the Action
COST Actions stay open for their whole lifetime. Chemists, physicists, materials scientists, engineers, designers and industry partners are all welcome.
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