DNA encodes the foundations of life, but it can also be thought of as a physical material, where its information-carrying capacity can be used to encode complexity in the structures it forms. I will talk about our group’s work studying DNA in a material setting. First, I will zoom in on the microscopic dynamics of DNA, and ask how it changes the coarse-grained dynamics of systems of particles when these are coated with single-stranded DNA. We will use stochastic models and homogenization techniques to show that DNA changes the dynamics dramatically, and we confirm our predictions with experiments. Our model bears much in common with many biological systems, such as blood cells and virus particles, and we use our model to make predictions about the dynamics of these systems. Then, we will zoom out and ask how to best use DNA to encode highly specific interactions between particles. Specifically, we wish to understand how to avoid the “kinetic traps” that prevent a system of assembling particles from reaching its equilibrium, or stationary, state. We discovered an unexpected connection to a combinatorial property of graphs, which we use to propose a strategy for designing optimal interactions.