Å·ÃÀAV

Prof. Nicholas A. Kotov is working on conceptual foundations and technical realizations of biomimetic nanostructures. Examples of scientific advances in this area associated with his works include pioneering studies on graphene- and clay-based layered biomimetic nanocomposites, self-organization of nanoparticles, chiral nanomaterials, and omnidispersible colloids.  His contribution to technology include ultrastrong nacre-mimetic nanocomposites, soft neuroprosthetic implants, 3D tissue replicas for drug-testing, chiral biosensors, and cartilage-like electrolytes for batteries. Prof. Kotov is a founder of several start-up companies that commercialized bioinspired nanomaterials for biomedical, military, energy, and automotive technologies. 

Bettina V. Lotsch studied Chemistry at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) and the University of Oxford and received her PhD from LMU Munich in 2006. After a postdoctoral stay at the University of Toronto as a Feodor-Lynen fellow she was appointed assistant professor at LMU Munich in 2009 (tenure 2014). In 2011, she became leader of an independent research group at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart while being professor at LMU.
Since 2017 Bettina is Director and head of the Nanochemistry Department at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research.
 
Her research explores the rational synthesis of new materials by combining the tools of molecular, solid-state and nanochemistry. Focal points include “smart” photonic crystals for optical sensing, porous frameworks for photocatalysis, solid electrolytes for Li ion batteries and soft chemistry routes towards 2D materials.
Bettina was awarded an ERC Starting Grant (2014) and has been elected a Fellow of the Å·ÃÀAV in 2014. Her work has been recognized by a number of awards, most recently by the EU-40 Materials Prize 2017 of the European Materials Research Society

Ian Manners is Canadian and British and was born in London, England. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Bristol, he conducted postdoctoral work in Germany and then in the USA. He then joined the University of Toronto, Canada as an Assistant Professor in 1990 and was promoted to Full Professor in 1995 and was made a Canada Research Chair in 2001. In 2006 he returned to his Alma Mater to take up a Chair in Inorganic, Macromolecular and Materials Chemistry supported by an EU Marie Curie Chair. His research interests broadly focus on synthetic problems at molecular, macromolecular, and longer length scales and currently involve catalytic main group chemistry and main group polymers, functional metallopolymers, and crystallization-driven self-assembly processes. He is the recipient of a range of awards including a Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (from the US), the Steacie Prize (from Canada), the Å·ÃÀAV Award in Main Group Chemistry, the Å·ÃÀAV Peter Day Award for Soft Matter Materials Chemistry (2012), and a Humboldt Research Award from Germany (2011). He is an elected member of both the Canadian and the British National Academies of Science. His work is documented in over 650 career publications and 4 books and has been presented in over 500 invited and plenary lectures worldwide. 

 Nam-Gyu Park is professor and SKKU-Fellow at School of Chemical Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University. He received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. from Seoul National University in 1988, 1992 and 1995, respectively. He worked at ICMCB-CNRS, France, from 1996 to 1997 and at National Renewable Energy Laboratory, USA, from 1997 to 1999 as postdoctoral researchers. He worked as Director of Solar Cell Research Center at Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) from 2005 to 2009 and as a principal scientist at Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) from 2000 to 2005 before joining Sungkyunkwan University as a full professor in 2009. He has been doing researches on high efficiency mesoscopic nanostructured solar cells since 1997. He is pioneer of solid state perovskite solar cell, which was first developed in 2012. He was selected as a New Class of Nobel Prize-Worthy Scientists in September 20, 2017 and included in 3,300 highly cited researchers (top 1% scientists) in November 15, 2017 by Clarivate Analytics. He is a fellow of Korean Academy of Science and Technology (KAST) since 2017.

Nicola Spaldin is the professor of materials theory at ETH Zurich. She developed the class of materials known as multiferroics, which combine simultaneous ferromagnetism and ferroelectricity, for which she received the 2017 L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science award among other honors. She is a passionate science educator, director of her department’s study program, and holder of the ETH Golden Owl Award for excellence in teaching. When not trying to make a room-temperature superconductor, she can be found playing her clarinet, or skiing or climbing in the Alps.

The academic career of Fraser Stoddart can be traced through thick and thin from the Athens of the North to the Windy City beside Lake Michigan with interludes on the edge of the Canadian Shield beside Lake Ontario, in the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire, on the Plains of Cheshire beside the Wirral, in the Midlands of the Heartland of Albion, and in the City of the Angels beside the Peaceful Sea. He has been a member of the faculty at Northwestern University since 2008. He is a Board of Trustees Professor and Director of the Center for the Chemistry of Integrated Systems. His research interests are in chemistry beyond the molecule, which, combined with his interest in templation, has led to the template-directed synthesis, based on molecular recognition and self-assembly processes, of a wide range of mechanically interlocked molecules, bistable variants of which have found their way in the form of switches into molecular electronic devices and drug delivery systems. In terms of molecular structure, his research straddles the size regime from the mesomolecular scale all the way up to the nanoscopic, microscopic and macroscopic levels: it includes wholly synthetic polymers and metal-organic frameworks. He also embraces radical chemistry in both the supramolecular and mechanostereochemical domains

Cameron Alexander is Professor of Polymer Therapeutics, a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Fellow, an EPSRC Impact Fellow, and Head of the Division of Molecular Therapeutics and Formulation at the School of Pharmacy, University of Nottingham, UK.
Professor Alexander received degrees (BSc and PhD) in Chemistry from the University of Durham, UK and carried out post-doctoral research at the Melville Laboratory for Polymer Synthesis, University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Å·ÃÀAV and the Higher Education Academy, Chair of the EPSRC Strategic Advisory Team for Physical Sciences and a recent (2009-2014) EPSRC Leadership Fellow.  Prof Alexander has published ~ 200 refereed articles in areas ranging from drug delivery and regenerative medicine to synthetic biology, receiving nearly 9000 citations to date. From 2006-2016, Professor Alexander led the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Advanced Therapeutics and Nanomedicines at Nottingham and University College London with leading pharmaceutical industry partners. He received the Å·ÃÀAV Macro Group Medal 2014 for contributions to polymer science.
Professor Alexander has been fortunate to work with scientists from more than 20 countries in his research group and is proud to serve the Å·ÃÀAV as Chair of the Macro Group UK.

Prof. Steven P. Armes received his BSc and PhD degrees in Chemistry from the University of Bristol in 1983 and 1987 respectively. After a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, he joined the University of Sussex as a Lecturer. He was promoted to full Professor in 2000, moved to the University of Sheffield in 2004 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2014.

Professor Armes has published more than 600 papers (H-index = 109) and has supervised 55 PhD students. His current research interests are focused on polymerisation-induced self-assembly, RAFT polymerisation, polymer colloids, block copolymer self-assembly, water-soluble polymers, stimulus-responsive polymers, biocompatible polymers, branched copolymers and microgels.

Professor Armes has received the 2018 Royal Society Armours and Brasiers’ Company prize, the 2017 Macro Group medal for outstanding achievement in polymer science, the 2017 ECIS Solvay prize, the 2016 DSM Materials Science Award, the German Colloid Society’s 2015 Colloid and Polymer Science Lectureship, the 2014 Å·ÃÀAV Interdisciplinary Prize, the 2013 Å·ÃÀAV Tilden Prize, the Å·ÃÀAV 2010 Peter Day award and the 2007 Å·ÃÀAV Macro Group Medal. He is a former ERC Advanced Investigator grant holder and currently holds a four-year EPSRC Fellowship in Particle Technology. He also leads a £7.1 M Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) programme in the field of Polymers, Soft Matter and Colloids at U. Sheffield, which funds 55 PhD students over five years.

Matthew L. Becker is the W. Gerald Austen Endowed Chair of Polymer Science and Polymer Engineering and Professor of Polymer Science and Biomedical Engineering at The University of Akron. He completed his PhD in organic chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis.  He began his independent research career at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.  His multidisciplinary research team is focused on developing bioactive polymers for regenerative medicine and addressing unmet medical needs at the interface of chemistry, materials and medicine. To date, his group has published more than 130 papers and has 35 patents issued or pending. He is the founder of three start-up companies, 3D BioResins, 3D BioActives and Fortem Polymers. Professor Becker was awarded the Macromolecules-Biomacromolecules Young Investigator Award in 2015.  He is a Kavli Fellow and a Fellow of the Å·ÃÀAV, the American Institute of Medical and Biomedical Engineering and the PMSE Division of the American Chemical Society. 

Neil Champness is the Professor of Chemical Nanoscience at the University of Nottingham, UK. His research spans chemical nanoscience and molecular organization. In particular he focusses on molecular design and synthetic methods, employing self-assembly to create framework materials on surfaces and in the solid-state and for the creation of interlocked structures in solution. His research achievements have been recognised by the award of a number of Å·ÃÀAV prizes including the Corday-Morgan Medal and Prize (2006), Supramolecular Chemistry Award (2010) and Surfaces and Interfaces Award (2016). He held a Royal Society Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship (2010) and a Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award (2011-2016). He is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales (FLSW) and the Å·ÃÀAV (FÅ·ÃÀAV). In 2011 he was identified as one of the top 100 most cited chemists of the previous decade worldwide and has been designated a Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher.

Guosong Chen is a professor in Department of Macromolecular Sciences, Fudan University. Her current research focus is carbohydrate-based macromolecular self-assembly and its biological functions. She received Excellent Youth Foundation from NSFC in 2013. As corresponding author, she published more than 40 papers in J. Am. Chem. Soc., Nature Communications, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., Adv. Materials and other journals. She was elected as Fellow of Royal Chemical Society (FÅ·ÃÀAV) and serves as Associate Editor of ACS Macro Letters and international board member for Polymer Chemistry, Bioconjugate Chemistry, Polymer International etc.

Dr. Coudert is a Researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), where his group applies computational chemistry methods at various scales to investigate the physical and chemical properties of nanoporous materials, and in particular stimuli-responsive materials with anomalous behaviour. He obtained his PhD from the University Paris-Sud (France) in 2007, for his work on the properties of water and solvated electrons confined in zeolite nanopores. He worked as post-doctoral researcher at University College London (UK) on the growth of metal-organic frameworks on surfaces, before joining CNRS in 2008. He has received the Early-Career Researcher award from the French Physical Chemistry division, was named a Distinguished Junior Member of the French Chemical Society, and was awarded the 2018 International Award for Creative Work by the Japan Society of Coordination Chemistry.

Olivier Delaire is Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and the Department of Physics at Duke University (since 2016). His research group investigates the fundamental role of atomic dynamics in energy conversion processes and material functionality. To this end, his team uses an array of experimental techniques (neutron and x-ray scattering, transport and thermodynamics measurements, optical spectroscopy and ultrafast techniques) as well as first-principles simulations of phonons and atomic dynamics in materials. Systems of particular interest include thermoelectrics, superionic conductors, halide perovskites, ferroelectrics and multiferroics. He obtained his PhD (2006) from Caltech, during which he uncovered the importance of adiabatic electron-phonon coupling at high temperature (Rosen PhD prize at Los Alamos). He was a Clifford Shull fellow in the Neutron Sciences Directorate at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (2008), and subsequently a Staff Researcher in the Materials Science and Technology Division (2012-2015). He was the recipient of a DOE Early Career Award (2014).

Rachel Evans is a lecturer in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy at the University of Cambridge. She obtained her PhD in Physical Chemistry in 2007 from Swansea University, before undertaking postdoctoral research at the Université Paris-Sud (France) and the University of Coimbra (Portugal).  She was appointed as an Assistant Professor in Chemistry at Trinity College Dublin (Ireland) in 2011 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2016, before moving to take up her current post in 2017. Rachel’s research is multidisciplinary and involves polymer, colloid and photophysical chemistry. Her current focus is the development of photoactive polymer-hybrid materials for luminescent solar devices, organic photovoltaics and stimuli-responsive membranes. In 2017 she was awarded the Dillwyn Medal for STEMM from the Learned Society of Wales and the Macro Group UK Young Researchers Medal. Rachel currently serves as Chair of the Å·ÃÀAV Photophysics and Photochemistry Group and sits on the Member Networks committee.

Sandrine Heutz is a Professor in Materials at Imperial College London.  Her group develops new strategies for the growth and characterisation of molecular films and nanostructures, and aims to control their spin interactions for applications including molecular spintronics and photovoltaics.  She is also a member of the London Centre for Nanotechnology, and a Fellow of the Å·ÃÀAV.  Prior to her appointment at Imperial College, she was a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow at University College London, and a post-doc and PhD student in Chemistry at Imperial College London. She is originally from Belgium, where she obtained her BSc from the University of Liège in 1998.

Malika Jeffries-EL received BA degrees in Chemistry and Africana Studies at Wellesley College and Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in chemistry from The George Washington University. After spending one year at Smith College as a Mendenhall Fellow she worked as a post-doctoral researcher under the direction of Professor Richard D. McCullough at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2005, she joined the faculty in the Chemistry Department at Iowa State University and was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2012. She was a Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Professor in the chemistry department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2015. She joined the Department of Chemistry and Division of Materials Science at Boston Univeristy in 2016.
Dr. Jeffries-EL's research focuses on the development of organic semiconductors–materials that combine the processing properties of polymers with the electronic properties of semiconductors. She has authored over 40 publications, received over 3500 citations and given over 100 lectures domestically and abroad. She has won numerous awards including the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award (2008), the Lloyd Ferguson Award from the National Organization of Black Chemist and Chemical Engineers (2009), NSF CAREER award (2009), the ACS-Women Chemist Committee Rising Star award (2012) the Iota Sigma Pi Agnes Fay Morgan Award (2013) and ACS Fellow (2018). She is currently an Associate Editor for the Journal of Materials Chemistry C. She has also served on the editorial advisory boards for Macromolecules and Chemical and Engineering News. Professor EL, is also a staunch advocate for diversity and dedicated volunteer that has served in several activities within the American Chemical Society including the advisory board for the Women Chemist of Color Initiative and the Women Chemist Committee. She also serves the community through her work with Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated (AKA). Dr. Jeffries-EL is a native of Brooklyn, New York.

Professor Doug MacFarlane is an Australian Laureate Fellow at Monash University’s School of Chemistry and leader of the Energy Program in the Australian Centre for Electromaterials Science. He is one of the pioneers of the field of ionic materials and his research group continues to break new ground in this cutting-edge area of inter-disciplinary chemistry.  Ionic materials are broad family of previously un-discovered materials and media that are finding application in diverse contexts including batteries, solar cells, green solvents and medicinal chemistry. Professor Macfarlane’s group along with collaborators in Australia and worldwide has contributed seminal work in all of these fields. He has published more than 650 papers and 30 patents, including papers in Science and Nature. His papers have been cited more than 33,000 times and have an h-index of 82.
Professor MacFarlane was a BSc(Hons) graduate of Victoria University Wellington, NZ and PhD from Purdue University, Indiana. He was appointed Professor of Chemistry at Monash University in 1995.  He was elected to the Australian Academy of Science in 2007 and the Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering in 2009. He is currently a member of the Editorial Advisory Boards of Chemical Communications, Green Chemistry, Sustainable Energy and Fuels, ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering and ChemSusChem. He is an International Fellow of the Queens University Belfast, a Visiting Professor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Huangshan Distinguished Visiting Professor at HuFei University of Technology. He has recently been the recipient of the Australian Academy of Science’s Craig Medal for Chemistry and the Victoria Prize for Science and Innovation.

Brent C. Melot received his Ph.D. from the Materials Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2010 under the supervision of Ram Seshadri. His research at UCSB focused on understanding the relationship between complex superexchange pathways and the resulting magnetic properties of oxide spinels. After completing his doctoral work, he joined the Laboratoire de Réactivité et Chimie des Solides in Amiens as a postdoctoral research associate under Jean-Marie Tarascon. In July 2012, he began his independent career in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles where his group works to develop materials design principles for improving the performance of a wide range of functional materials including: heterogeneous catalysts, photovoltaics, intercalation electrodes, and solid electrolytes.

Paul Saines is a lecturer in the School of Physical Sciences at the University of Kent.  He received a BSc. (2004) and PhD (2008) in solid state chemistry from the University of Sydney. This was followed by a postdoc at the University of Cambridge and a Glasstone fellowship at the University of Oxford, before moving to Kent in 2015. The research in his group primarily focuses on the synthesis and characterisation of ferroic, chiefly magnetic, materials that combine inorganic and organic building blocks into extended structures. This includes interests in multiferroics, low dimensional and frustrated magnetism, with a particular focus on probing how these properties originate from the atomic scale structure of these materials. He was awarded an Australian Institute for Nuclear Science and Engineering Gold Medal in 2009 and the Institute of Physics Physical Crystallography prize in 2015 for this work.

Dr Zlatka Stoeva is a managing director and a co-founder of DZP Technologies Ltd. Zlatka started her career as a scientist, following the completion of PhD degree at the University of St Andrews in 2001, where she worked on polymer electrolytes for lithium ion batteries. She then held post-doctoral research positions at the University of Aberdeen (2002) and the University of Nottingham (2002-2005) working on lithium ion conductors and other energy storage materials. During this time, she published more than 20 peer-reviewed articles.  In 2006, Zlatka moved on to a business-focussed role at the technology transfer office at the University of Cambridge. She spent several years in this role, working on the commercialisation, patenting, and licensing of technologies arising from university science.
 
Since moving full-time to DZP Technologies in 2011, Zlatka initiated several R&D programmes and collaborative projects in which the company developed advanced materials for emerging applications, such as flexible and stretchable electronics, wearable technology, and sensors for the Internet-of-Things. Nowadays, the company offers a range of specialty products including conductive silver and carbon inks, graphene dispersions and inks, thermal materials, and various customised formulations. DZP Technologies is renowned for its water-based, zero-VOC (volatile organic compound) inks which have low environmental impact, in addition to significantly reduced manufacturing and compliance costs.
 
Zlatka remains actively involved in materials research and is an industrial supervisor of PhD students sponsored by the company and studying at UK universities.

Dr. María J. Vicent received her Ph.D. degree in 2001 in chemistry on solid supports from University Jaume I Castellón after several scientific stays in Prof. Fréchet’s lab. at University California, Berkeley (USA). Then, she moved to more biomedically oriented research, initially with a Spanish company Instituto Biomar SA., and subsequently at the Centre for Polymer Therapeutics with Prof. R. Duncan after the award of a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2002. In 2004, María joined Centro de Investigación Príncipe Felipe (CIPF) as research associate through a Marie Curie Reintegration contract and was promoted to her current position, head of Polymer Therapeutics Laboratory at CIPF, in 2006. Currently, she is the scientist responsible for the Screening Platform and also coordinates the Advanced Therapies Program at CIPF. She has been the coordinator of the Valencian Community Strategy on Innovative Medicines becoming one of the Specialist site in the ERIC EU-OPENSCREEN. 
Her research group focused on the development of novel nanopharmaceuticals for different therapeutic and diagnostic applications, in particular Polymer Therapeutics for unmet clinical needs and has been funded by national and European grants (several acting as coordinator including a ERC Consolidator grant-MyNano and ERC-PoC-POLYIMMUNE) from academia as well as industry (funding »6M€). María received several prizes including the IVth and the IXth Idea awards, co-authored 100 peer reviewed papers (h index: 35; »4900 citations, google scholar) and 9 patents, 2 of them licensed to the pharmaceutical industry and a third one used as foundation of the spin off company ‘Polypeptide Therapeutic Solutions SL’ in 2012. She was the Spanish President of the Spanish-Portuguese Chapter of the Controlled Release Society up to end 2013 and the chair of key conferences on the nanomedicine field such as, the International Symposium on Polymer Therapeutics: From Laboratory to Clinical Practice Or the Anual meeting CRS 2019. María is member of the editorial board of key journal in the field including Adv. Drug Deliv Rev, J. Control Rel., Nanomedicine:NBM, Polymer Chemistry, Biomaterial Sciences, Mol. Pharmaceutics or Adv Polym Sci. María has already supervised 10 PhD students and 9 more are ongoing, many through different competitive grants. 

Elizabeth von Hauff studied Physics at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. She completed her PhD in 2005 at the University of Oldenburg, Germany, with focus on charge carrier transport in organic semiconductors. In 2011 Elizabeth completed her habilitation in experimental physics, and then accepted a joint appointment as Associate Professor between the Institute of Physics at the University of Freiburg and the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE). In 2013 Elizabeth was appointed Associate Professor in Physics at the VU Amsterdam. She is interested in fundamental questions in physics and chemistry within the context of real applications. 

Kim Jelfs is a Lecturer and Royal Society University Research Fellow (URF) in the Department of Chemistry at Imperial College London, UK. Her group specialises in the use of computer simulations to assist in the discovery of supramolecular materials. This includes the development of software to automate the assembly and testing of materials, with the application of artificial intelligence techniques. The materials studied include porous materials for molecular separations or encapsulations or materials for the generation of renewable energy. Kim completed her PhD in Computational Chemistry at UCL (UK) in 2010, studying the crystal growth of zeolitic materials. She worked as a post-doctoral researcher conducting simulations across the experimental groups at the University of Liverpool, before beginning her independent research at Imperial College in 2013. She was awarded a 2018 Å·ÃÀAV Harrison-Meldola Memorial Prize.

Prof Peter Skabara is the Ramsay Chair of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow and the Deputy-Editor-in-Chief and Chair of the Journal of Materials Chemistry C. He is the author of over 180 papers, focusing on the synthesis and application of new materials for organic electronics. Prof Skabara is the recipient of a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award holder, which was gained for his research into monodisperse macromolecular conjugated materials for photonic applications.

Magda Titirici has a PhD from University of Dortumnd, a German Habilitation from the Max-Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces and University of Potsdam and is currently a Professor of Sustainable Materials Chemistry at Queen Mary University of London.
Magda is the author of around highly cited 150 publications (h-index=62) in the field of sustainable materials for energy storage and conversion, several book chapters and two edited books. She is an associate editor for J. Mater. Chem. A (Å·ÃÀAV).
Magda has been awarded the Rosenhain Medal and Price from the Institute of Materials and Mines in London in recognition of distinguished achievements in materials science under the age of 40 in 2016, she is the USERN laureate in physical sciences 2017 as well as the recipient of an honoray PhD from University of Stockholm in 2017, the Chinese Academy of Science President’s Fellowship in 2018 as well as the Å·ÃÀAV Corday Morgan Prize 2018.

Dr. Silvia Vignolini studied Physics at the University of Florence, Italy. In 2009, she was awarded a PhD in Solid State Physics at the European Laboratory for non-Linear Spectroscopy and the Physics Department at the University of Florence. In 2010, she moved to Cambridge as a post-doctoral research associate working in the Cavendish Laboratory and the Plant Science Department. In 2013, she started her independent research becoming a   BBSRC David Philip Fellow. Dr. Vignolini is currently a Reader in Chemistry and Bio-inspired materials in the Chemistry Department in Cambridge. Her research interest lies at the interface of chemistry, soft-matter physics, optics, and biology. In particular, her research focuses on the study of how natural materials (such as cellulose) are assembled into complex architectures within living organisms and how these architectures define the organism`s optical appearance. Her approach to fabricate novel optical materials is unique in the field of bio-mimetic and photonics. Grounded on her multidisciplinary background, Dr. Vignolini uses optics to understand the assembly of naturally occurring photonic structures and she applies those concepts to fabricate novel bio-inspired sustainable materials.