Vinothan N. Manoharan

About

Vinothan N. Manoharan is the Wagner Family Professor of Chemical Engineering and a Professor of Physics at Harvard University. He is a faculty member in both the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Physics department at Harvard. Vinny earned his PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he conducted research under the guidance of Professor David J. Pine. Following his doctoral studies, he pursued postdoctoral research with Professor John Crocker. His research interests lie at the intersection of soft matter, biophysics, and optics, as indicated by his leadership of the Manoharan Lab, which focuses on these areas.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Materials science
• Optics
• Physics
• Mathematics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Statistical physics
• Optoelectronics
• Molecular physics
• Computational physics

Selected publications

• Designing angle-independent structural colors using Monte Carlo simulations of multiple scattering

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2021 · 86 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  ) in an experimental system, using prescribed components and a microstructure that is easy to fabricate. Finally, we use the model to find the limits of angle-independent structural colors for a given system. These results enable an engineering design approach to structural color for many different applications.

  DOI

• Effects of multiple scattering on angle-independent structural color in disordered colloidal materials

  Physical review. E · 2020 · 65 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Disordered packings of colloidal spheres show angle-independent structural color when the particles are on the scale of the wavelength of visible light. Previous work has shown that the positions of the peaks in the reflectance spectra can be predicted accurately from a single-scattering model that accounts for the effective refractive index of the material. This agreement shows that the main color peak arises from short-range correlations between particles. However, the single-scattering model…

  DOI

• Self-Assembly of Patchy Colloidal Rods into Photonic Crystals Robust to Stacking Faults

  ACS Nano · 2021 · 47 citations

  tetrahedral clusters to yield a mixed phase of cubic and hexagonal polymorphs closely related to RCD. We use Monte Carlo simulations to show how these routes avoid a metastable amorphous phase. Finally, we show that both the polymorphs support spectrally overlapping PBGs. Importantly, randomly stacked hybrids of these polymorphs also display PBGs, thus circumventing the requirement of polymorph selection in a scalable fabrication method.

  DOI

• In-line holographic microscopy with model-based analysis

  Nature Reviews Methods Primers · 2022 · 34 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Effect of coat-protein concentration on the self-assembly of bacteriophage MS2 capsids around RNA

  Nanoscale · 2024-01-01 · 10 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  . Although much previous work has explored the effects of RNA-protein interactions on the assembly products, relatively little research has explored the effects of coat-protein concentration. We mix coat protein and RNA from bacteriophage MS2, and we use a combination of gel electrophoresis, dynamic light scattering, and transmission electron microscopy to investigate the assembly products. We show that with increasing coat-protein concentration, the products transition from well-formed MS2 VLPs…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• CAREER: High-speed 3D Imaging of Colloidal Self-Assembly with Digital Holographic Microscopy

  NSF · $451k · 2008–2013

• Structural transitions, energetics, and folding pathways of colloidal clusters

  NSF · $378k · 2013–2018

Frequent coauthors

• Brian Leahy

  Harvard University

  919 shared

• Ronald Alexander

  Harvard University Press

  774 shared

• Ronald Alexander

  Harvard University Press

  141 shared

• Rees F. Garmann

  San Diego State University

  39 shared

• Ryan McGorty

  University of San Diego

  32 shared

• David J. Pine

  New York University

  30 shared

• Gi‐Ra Yi

  Pohang University of Science and Technology

  29 shared

• David M. Kaz

  Harvard University

  27 shared

Labs

• Manoharan LabPI

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