Kushal Bagchi received his bachelor’s degree in Chemistry and Biology from St Joseph’s College, Bangalore, and a master’s in chemistry from Pondicherry University. Kushal received his PhD degree in Chemistry in 2020 from UW-Madison under the supervision of Professor Mark Ediger. In his PhD, Kushal worked on the structural characterization of vapor-deposited glasses of organic semiconductors, using synchrotron-based X-ray scattering techniques. Kushal joined PME at the University of Chicago in 2020 as a postdoctoral researcher and currently works under the supervision of Prof. Paul Nealey.
Kushal is currently working on the directed self-assembly in nematic and blue-phase liquid crystals. Kushal’s research involves using defect structures in a liquid-crystalline medium to template the self-assembly of nanoparticles and polymeric precursors. Precisely guiding self-assembly in liquid crystals could have broad implications for applications in optoelectronics and plasmonics.