The Patek Lab has won funding through the Department of Defense program "Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative." This highly-competitive program attempts to accelerate research progress by funding cross-disciplinary teams of scientists. The Patek Lab will lead a consortium of researchers from Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of California-Irvine, the University of Maryland, and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. The title of their study is "Evolutionary Mechanics of Impulsive Biological Systems: Guiding Scalable Synthetic Designs."