Vinod Saranathan received his bachelors in Physics with a minor in Philosophy cum laude from Ohio Wesleyan University, where he honed his life-long interest in ornithology under the late Professor Jed Burtt and true to his liberal arts education, completed his senior thesis in observational astronomy. Funded by a Dillon and Mary Ripley Graduate Fellowship, he earned his MS in 2007 and a PhD in 2011 from Yale University, in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, where he studied the physics and evolution of structural colour production in birds and insects with Professor Richard Prum. During his dissertation, he established synchrotron Small Angle X-ray Scattering (SAXS) as a precise, high-throughput analytical technique for assaying complex 3D biophotonic nanostructures. Subsequently, Dr Saranathan was a Royal Society Newton Fellow at the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, where he interrogated the nanostructural basis and consequences of fine structural colour variation within and between local Oxfordshire populations of blue tits in Professor Ben Sheldon's group. At Oxford, he was elected to an Edward P. Abraham Cephalosporin Junior Research Fellowship at Linacre College. Just prior to joining Yale-NUS College, National University of Singapore, where he was faculty from 2015-2021 in the Division of Science and taught across the Common Curriculum, Dr Saranathan was a Research Fellow in the Division of Physics and Applied Physics, School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, at the Nanyang Technological University, studying the theoretical photonics of bio-inspired, chiral meta-materials with Professor Yidong Chong. Since 2022, Vinod is an Associate Professor at the Division of Sciences, School of Interwoven Arts and Sciences, Krea University, a new liberal arts university in Southern India. |