https://doi.org/10.1039/D0TB00896F It is my privilege and honor to be highlighted as the Journal of Material Chemistry B's Emerging Investigators for 2020. Together with our group's young budding scientists, Chenxi Zhai, Tianjiao Li, and Haoyuan Shi, we review the discovery and design of next-generation bio-inspired materials by harnessing the virtual space in materials design: materials omics (materiomics), materials informatics, computational modelling and simulations, artificial intelligence (AI), and big data. This is critical as materials chemistry is at the forefront of the global “Fourth Industrial Revolution”, in part by establishing a “Materials 4.0” paradigm. A key aspect of this paradigm is developing methods to effectively integrate hardware, software, and biological systems.