Despite years of recycling efforts, only about 10 percent of polymer waste ends up in recycling facilities, with the majority still accumulating in landfills or oceans, emphasizing the need for eco-friendly materials combining renewable sourcing, sustainable processing, and biodegradability. Thermoformable biopolymer assemblies or bioplastics are eco-friendly materials that could be sourced from biological cell or tissue (biomatter), without expensive and wasteful extraction and pre-processing. The most significant limitation in the ability to design these bioplastics is a poor understanding of the fundamental mechanisms controlling the transformation of biomatter to cohesive bioplastics. This Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) grant supports research that will combine high-throughput data capture, multiscale modeling, and machine learning to understand the molecular and chemical mechanisms controlling the transition from organism to bioplastic during processing. With that understanding, design pathways will be developed to tailor the processing and composition of the initial structure to control the macroscopic properties, and degradation that occurs during and after use. The broad impact of this work will be a new class of entirely biodegradable plastics with performance comparable to commodity plastics but manufactured sustainably. To support the next-generation sustainable materials workforce, the grant will also support mentoring of graduate and undergraduate students, active engagement in outreach activities, and efforts to enhance diversity and inclusivity in STEM.