2017 Robert Dirks Molecular Programming Prize – Dr. Ashwin Gopinath

The 2017 Robert Dirks Molecular Programming Prize was awarded to Dr. Ashwin Gopinath 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.