About Carson J. Bruns
It can be hard to make sense of me at first glance. My full middle name is “J.” but the J stands for nothing and the period is silent. I tend to swim away from the main stream. I ride freeskates. My musical instrument of choice is a 90-year-old 42″ Thai gong. I weave enormous nets between trees and stack rocks for fun. I paint wildlife left-handed, in colors no animal has ever been. I live in a treehouse above Fourmile Creek with my family, whose other home town is Black Rock City. My body is covered in dorky science tattoos, many of which are self-administered. I hold degrees in religion and chemistry yet I’m a professor of mechanical engineering. I must admit, I’m a little weird.
The empty sandbox. I was an adopted child: shy, neurodivergent (which I had no word for at the time), and small, I didn’t hit puberty until age 18. I was probably drawn to the empty sandboxes because I didn’t fit in. But the same traits that cost you in your youth can start paying somewhere around 30 as a scientist. In research, the empty sandboxes are goldmines where obvious questions are still unanswered and good questions are still unasked.
There is a redemption story and it is that I was wrong about what I liked. I thought the appeal was the emptiness, but it turned out to be the digging. Every field I have wandered into was already full of people, and getting to play with them is the best part of the job. Fraser Stoddart taught me the mechanical bond. Sam Stupp taught me self-assembly and clean energy. Matt Francis taught me biomaterials. Bang Bang taught me tattooing. Greg Whiting taught me sustainable electronics. Franck Vernerey gave my materials a theory. My students routinely teach me things I would never have found alone. Most of what is on this website exists because somebody who knew something I did not said yes. I still go looking for the unoccupied corner. I just stopped wanting to be alone in it.
Divergence. I’ve spent my career leaving subjects I know for ones I don’t, which from outside looks like restlessness. Designers have a word for the first half of it: divergence. Deliberately gathering more material than you need before you commit to anything. It’s a phase, not a temperament, and science teaches convergence beautifully while barely teaching the other half at all.
Convergence. Fifteen years of field hopping has cost me something: I’m rarely the deepest expert in the room (unless the room is full of molecular machinists). What I have instead is a one-of-a-kind kit: molecular machines, self-assembly, soft matter, biomaterials, skin, robotics, color. I’ve put none of it down. The bet is that convergence is where it pays: things built from six fields at once are things nobody standing in one would think to try. I’m not restless; I’ve just been gathering, and almost never alone.
A maker of color-changing tattoo inks and shape-shifting molecular machines, Carson Bruns is a chemist and artist who uses nanoscience to invent new materials and technologies. He is an Associate Professor at the ATLAS Institute and the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he directs the SEAM Lab.
He grew up in Loveland, Colorado, took a BA in chemistry and religion at Luther College, and earned a PhD in organic chemistry at Northwestern University with Nobel Laureate J. Fraser Stoddart and Samuel I. Stupp. He was a Miller Research Fellow at UC Berkeley with Matthew Francis before returning to Colorado. With Stoddart he co-authored The Nature of the Mechanical Bond: From Molecules to Machines (Wiley, 2016), the standard reference on molecules that behave as the world’s smallest machines.
His laboratory works across organic chemistry, biomedical engineering, soft-matter mechanics, sustainable energy, human–robot collaboration and interaction design, on the conviction that the interesting questions live between fields rather than inside them. The most visible result is the smart tattoo: intradermal nanosensors that report ultraviolet and ionizing radiation from inside the skin, and photochromic inks that made it out of the laboratory and onto the market in 2025 as Magic Ink, the world’s first rewritable tattoo ink. He is co-founder, president and chief scientific officer of HYPRSKN Inc., which commercializes that work.
He has co-authored more than sixty peer-reviewed papers, cited thousands of times, and holds an NSF CAREER Award. He was named an ASME Rising Star of Mechanical Engineering, and the American Chemical Society selected him as one of twelve scientists representing the themes of its 150th anniversary film series; his theme was interdisciplinary. His work has been covered by CNN, NPR, People, GQ, Inked and Chemical & Engineering News, and his TEDx talk on biomedical tattoos has been viewed about a million times.
A chemistry family tree running back to Kekulé and Wöhler, and forward to my students.
My doctoral advisors were Fraser Stoddart and Samuel Stupp, and my postdoctoral advisor was Matthew Francis. Each of them had advisors, and so on, and three lines run back through a long row of Nobel laureates to August Kekulé and Friedrich Wöhler, the grandfathers of organic chemistry.
The interconnectedness of mentors and collaborators mirrors biological diversification. I draw a lot of meaning from being a link in that chain. A link has two sides, so the people I have advised belong on it too. Only graduated doctoral students and postdocs are shown.