Carlos Portela

We think of materials as having certain properties—ceramic is brittle, glass can break, metal is heavy. 3D nanomaterials could flip those assumptions on their head. “Ceramics do not have to be brittle, a material’s color could change on demand, and a metallic material could be as light as a feather—all due to engineered 3D nanostructures,” says Carlos Portela, 30. Such materials have so far been made only in microscopic amounts in the lab, but  Portela has developed a process that allows him to create 3D nanomaterials you can hold in your hand. Such materials could help address a variety of engineering challenges, he says, since they have properties that no existing material could ever attain.