Robert Dirks Molecular Programming Prize 2017 – Dr. Ashwin Gopinath

The 2017 Robert Dirks Molecular Programming Prize was awarded to Dr. Ashwin Gopinath of the California Institute of Technology, for his work developing scalable and programmable nanophotonic devices. Combining the top-down scalability of photonic crystal cavity layout on a chip and the bottom-up programmability of DNA origami components that precisely organize emitters within cavities, the work bridges the fields of molecular programming and applied physics to offer a path toward label-free single-molecule detection and quantum information processing. Ashwin performed this research as a postdoctoral scholar under the supervision of Dr. Paul Rothemund at the California Institute of Technology.