Figure 1.

Materials engineering for stimulation of cells, tissues, and organs enables many important applications for biophysics research. Length scales of the modulation material can span through many orders of magnitude and surface nanostructuring improves compatibility with biological tissues and enables new functionalities, such as photoresponsive properties. Single free-standing nanostructures can be used to investigate cells on the subcellular level and study signal propagation pathways but can also be assembled into composite devices for tissue and organ-level studies of the electrophysiology or behaviors.