The micro- and nanostructure of materials determines their macroscopic properties. Currently, most synthetic methods used to control structure at these length scales consist of controlling the size and morphology of structural building blocks. Typically, these fabrication processes involves two distinct steps: the synthesis of the blocks, followed by their assembly. Instead, living systems generate structures across a broad range of length scales in one step directly from macromolecules, whose dimensions are much smaller than the characteristic scale of the final structure. Inspired by these examples, we wanted to learn how to introduce and control structure in materials at the nano- and microscale without having to pre-engineer the building blocks. Our strategies leveraged polymerization-induced phase separation in the solid state. First, we demonstrated how polymerization has the unique capability of triggering, controlling, and arresting phase separation.
Afterwards, we described how we exploited this ability to make durable, structurally correlated nanocomposites. Finally, we explain how we tuned the process parameters to control the length scale of the obtained structure. In some cases, the synthesized materials were able to display structural color
