Mas Subramanian
Oregon State University, OR·Chemistry
Color in paints, plastics, glass and ceramics comes from inorganic pigments, solid compounds that absorb some wavelengths of light and reflect others. For red, the long-standing options rely on toxic metals: cadmium, mercury or lead.
- Fields
Chemistry
Materials Science
- Topics
inorganic pigments
red pigment
transition metal oxides
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Sep 2026
What they work on
- Establish how crystal structure relates to optical properties for transition metal ions in trigonal bipyramidal coordination, the rare five-neighbor geometry behind intensely colored oxides such as YInMn blue.
- Design and synthesize new transition metal oxides containing red-producing color centers, such as chromium, that could be developed into commercially viable non-toxic red pigments.
- Explore mixed oxides, oxyfluorides and oxysulfides containing lone-pair ions, where a tin 5s or bismuth 6s band lies above the oxygen 2p band, and tune their bandgaps to yield brilliant yellow, orange and red colors.
- Assess the durability and color performance of promising candidate compounds for use in artist colors, industrial paints and other coating technologies.
More about the research
Environmental regulation is pushing these out of use, yet no safe red pigment matches them for brightness and durability, making a non-toxic red one of the most sought-after targets in colorant chemistry. This project searches for such materials among transition metal oxides, compounds of metals with oxygen, and their relatives.
Why it matters
A bright, durable red pigment free of cadmium, mercury and lead would give paint, plastics, ceramics and artist-color manufacturers a replacement for compounds being phased out by environmental law, reducing exposure to toxic metals for workers and consumers. The structure-color relationships uncovered along the way could also guide design of other colored inorganic materials.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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University of South Carolina-Columbia, SC·Materials Science·Early-career
Test whether tensile strain along vertical interfaces in perovskite nanocomposites grown by pulsed laser deposition increases oxygen vacancies and boosts electrical conductivity in electron-doped oxides.
Daniel Fredrickson
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Chemistry
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Johnpierre Paglione
University of Maryland, MD·Physics
Discover new High Entropy Quantum Materials using computational prediction and machine-learning-assisted searches within the AFLOW materials framework, combined with high-throughput synthesis.
The school
Oregon State University: 29 labs on PI Pages, $372M a year on research, 238 research doctorates a year.
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