Name of the speaker: Dr. Vinod Kumar Saranathan
Date/time: 17th July 2025,3:00 PM
Venue: SV Narasaiah Auditorium, IAP Department
Abstract: Insects are the most numerous animals on Earth. Among organisms, not surprisingly, insects display a remarkable array of structural color producing photonic nanostructures within scale cells sculpted by lyotropic precursors and then back filled with cuticle and later air upon programmed cell death, pre-empting contemporary engineering processes [1-3]. These features are intra-cellularly self-assembled at the hard to achieve mesoscopic length scales (100-500 nm), i.e., in the visible regime. Currently, lithographic techniques are restricted to near IR, whereas nanostructures with smaller lattice parameters fabricated via 3D-printing (stereolithography) followed by heat shrinkage are defect-ridden, not scalable or sustainable [4]. Organismal nanostructures (in insect wing scales) can also be patterned mechanically by buckling (including hierarchically) producing sub-micron features that rival our most complex designs for flexible electronics and soft robotics. In this talk, I will summarize how biology patterns multi-functional nanostructures and conclude with some biomimetic lessons for engineering.
References
[1] V Saranathan et al. 2010. Structure, function, and self-assembly of single network gyroid (I4(1)32) photonic crystals in butterfly wing scales. PNAS 107, 11676-11681
[2] V Saranathan et al. 2015. Structural Diversity of Arthropod Biophotonic Nanostructures Spans Amphiphilic Phase-Space. Nano Lett. 15, 3735-42;
[3] V Saranathan et al. 2021. Evolution of Single Gyroid Photonic Crystals in Bird Feathers. PNAS 18: e2101357118
[4] Y Liu et al. 2019. Structural color three-dimensional printing by shrinking photonic crystals. Nat. Comms. 10, 4340.
About the Speaker: Dr. Vinodkumar Saranathan is a CNRS Junior Chair Professor in Biomimicry at the Research Institute for Insect Biology (IRBI), a joint research unit between the CNRS and the University of Tours, where he studies the biomimicry of self-assembled photonic nanostructures in iridescent insect scales. Vinod received a bachelor’s degree in Physics with a minor in Philosophy from Ohio Wesleyan University, followed by a Master’s and a PhD at Yale University. Subsequently, Vinod was a Royal Society Newton Fellow and an EPA Cephalosporin Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College, at the University of Oxford. Vinod has been faculty at Yale-NUS College, National University of Singapore (NUS), and the School of Interwoven Arts and Sciences (SIAS) at Krea University, prior to joining the CNRS.