Silvia Vignolini is an associate professor of chemistry and bioinspired materials at the University of Cambridge. Vignolini studied physics at the Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy. She received a PhD degree in solid-state physics at the European Laboratory for Non-Linear Spectroscopy and the Physics Department at the Università degli Studi di Firenze. In 2010, she moved to Cambridge University as a postdoctoral research associate working in the Cavendish Laboratory and the Plant Science Department.

In 2013, Vignolini started her independent research, becoming a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council David Phillips Fellow. Her research interests lie at the interface of chemistry, soft-matter physics, optics, and biology. In particular, her research focuses on the study of how natural materials (e.g., cellulose) are assembled into complex architectures within living organisms and how such materials can be exploited to fabricate novel photonic pigments.

In her presentation, “Color Engineering: From Nature to Applications,” Vignolini will introduce some examples of natural photonic structures and review recent advances to fabricate biomimetic photonic pigments using the same materials as nature.

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