Nirmal Mazumder obtained his PhD degree in 2013 from National Yang-Ming University, Taiwan. He has two years of post-doctoral research experience. In 2016, he joined the Department of Biophysics, Manipal School of Life Sciences, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, India as an assistant professor. His research interests relate to the development of Stokes-Mueller-based light microscopy for tissue characterization and deep learning. He also investigates the photonics properties of diatoms as well as frustules for bio-photonics applications. He has published several peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. Richard Gordon’s involvement with diatoms goes back to 1970 with his capillarity model for their gliding motility, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. He later worked on a diffusion-limited aggregation model for diatom morphogenesis, which led to the first paper ever published on diatom nanotechnology in 1988. He organized the first workshop on diatom nanotech in 2003.