Judson Ryckman
Clemson University, SC·Engineering·Early-career
Colorimetric sensors, which report a measurement as a color change, can be read by a phone camera or simply by eye. They could bring diagnostics to places without laboratory equipment.
- Fields
Engineering
Physics
Materials Science
- Topics
structural color
metasurfaces
colorimetric sensing
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2027
What they work on
- Establish the theory of hyperchromatic structural color (HSC), mapping the limits of dynamic color change and how to maximize perceived color shifts in response to targeted stimuli.
- Design, fabricate and characterize metasurfaces, flat nanopatterned optical surfaces, optimized for multi-chrome laser illumination and tailored color trajectories, addressing integration and nanomanufacturing challenges.
- Measure the colorimetric sensing performance of these multi-chrome metasurfaces, including integration of responsive nanomaterials, to advance diagnostics readable by the naked eye.
- Run an optics and photonics education plan that exposes local high schoolers to STEM and connects undergraduates with optics and opto-electronics industry opportunities.
More about the research
But they usually lag far behind bulky, expensive benchtop instruments, because small changes in a sample are hard to turn into large, visible color shifts. This project seeks a general way to make tiny changes produce big color responses. It does this by designing the sensor and its light source together.
Why it matters
Low-cost sensors that can be read by eye or with a camera could bring accurate diagnostics to remote, disadvantaged or under-developed communities that lack laboratory equipment. If these color-based sensors match or beat benchtop instruments, they could make medical and other sensing faster, cheaper and easier to use.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Roberto Paiella
Boston University, MA·Engineering
Design and fabricate dielectric metasurfaces on commercial CMOS sensor arrays to build a phase-imaging meta-sensor (PIMS) array that reconstructs optical phase quantitatively in a single shot.
David McGee
College of New Jersey, NJ·Physics
Optimize the spatial resolution of a maskless printing system that writes surface microstructures by exploiting the photomechanical response of azopolymer films, in which light-responsive molecules in a flexible polymer deform the surface under polarized light.
Maxim Shcherbakov
University of California-Irvine, CA·Physics·Early-career
Determine the fundamental properties of photonic-phononic metasurfaces that pair resonant dielectric nanostructures with phonon-polaritonic materials such as hBN and MoO3, using full-wave simulations, nanofabrication and near-field microscopy.
The school
Clemson University: 19 labs on PI Pages, $339M a year on research, 297 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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