Silvia Vignolini is the Director of the Sustainable and Bio-inspired Materials Department at the Max Planck Institute of Colloid and Interfaces in Potsdam and a University Professor in Sustainability and Bio-inspired materials at the Chemistry Department in Cambridge. She 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.
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 biopolymers are assembled into complex architectures within living organisms and how they can be exploited to fabricate sustainable functional materials.
Key words
nitrocellulose, living materials, photonic structures in nature, light management in biofilms