Lecture On: Lessons from Nature By Dr. Vinodkumar Saranathan

                           DEPARTMENT OF INSTRUMENTATION AND APPLIED PHYSICS 

                                                        INDIAN INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE 

                                                                  BANGALORE – 560 012 

                                                 Cordially invites you for a short lecture on 

                        “Lessons from Nature: Structure, Function and Biomimetic Potential of 

                                              Organismal Photonic Nanostructure”                                                             

                                                                         By

                                                    Dr. Vinodkumar Saranathan 

                                  Division of Science, Yale-NUS College, National University of Singapore. 

                                                                                   Singapore. 

                                                             Date:  Tuesday, 6th, July 2021  

                                                                      Time:   04.00 P.M 

                                                         Venue:  Online (Microsoft Teams): 

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                                                                              Abstract 

Colors in organisms can be produced either chemically by pigments or physically by the interference of light scattered from biophotonic nanostructures or sometimes by both means. Fade-proof and vivid, saturated structural colors are common and conspicuous in animals and frequently used in social and sexual communication. Given that the underlying nanostructures are overwhelmingly diverse in form and function, their characterization has lagged behind for over a century. I have pioneered the use of synchrotron Small Angle X-ray Scattering as a high throughput technique to structurally and optically characterize biophotonic nanostructures from hundreds of species, in a comparative framework. This has led to the understanding that all these diverse, mesoscale nanostructures share a unifying theme – they appear to be self-assembled within cells by bottom-up and directed processes. In this seminar, I will broadly summarize our current state of knowledge about the structure, function, and evolution of organismal structural colors in birds and insects. and discuss some future directions on how understanding the intracellular development of biophotonic nanostructures can lead to novel, eco-friendly routes to mesoscale synthesis for advanced applications from sensors, photonics, energy harvesting to catalysis.  

Biography: 

Dr. Vinod Saranathan is faculty at the Division of Science, Yale-NUS College, an elite 4-year liberal arts college jointly founded by Yale University and National University of Singapore, where he studies the physical and biological basis of structural color-producing biophotonic nanostructures in birds and insects, towards their biomimetic synthesis for technological applications. He has over 25 publications in some of the leading international scientific journals including PNAS, Advanced Materials, Proceedings of the Royal Society B and his research has been featured in leading international print (New York Times, LA Times, Atlantic Monthly, etc.) and broadcast news media (BBC, CBC, NPR, Channel News Asia, etc.). His diverse teaching interests include Biophysics, Scientific Inquiry, Quantitative Reasoning, Evolution, and Ornithology. Vinod received a bachelor’s degree in Physics with a minor in Philosophy cum laude from Ohio Wesleyan University. Funded by a Dillon and Mary Ripley Graduate Fellowship, he earned a Master’s in 2007 and a PhD in 2011 from Yale University, in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, where he studied structural color production in birds. Subsequently, Vinod was a Royal Society Newton Fellow at the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford. While at Oxford, he was also elected to an Edward P. Abraham Cephalosporin Junior Research Fellowship at Linacre College. Prior to joining Yale-NUS College, Vinod was a Research Fellow at the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University.