Richard Friend holds the Cavendish Professorship of Physics at the University of Cambridge. His research encompasses the physics, materials science and engineering of semiconductor devices made with carbon-based semiconductors, particularly polymers. His research advances have shown that carbon-based semiconductors have significant applications in LEDs, solar cells, lasers, and electronics. His current research interests are directed to novel schemes – including ideas inspired by recent insights into Nature’s light harvesting – that seek to improve the performance and cost of solar cells.

Thuc-Quyen Nguyen is a professor in the Center for Polymers and Organic Solids and the Chemistry & Biochemistry Department at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She received her Ph.D. degree in physical chemistry from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2001 under the supervision of Professor Benjamin Schwartz. Her thesis focused on photophysics of conducting polymers. She was a research associate in the Department of Chemistry and the Nanocenter at Columbia University working with Professors Louis Brus and Colin Nuckolls on molecular self-assembly, nanoscale characterization and molecular electronics. She also spent time at IBM Research Center at T. J. Watson (Yorktown Heights, NY) working with Richard Martel and Phaedon Avouris. Her current research interests are structure-function-property relationships in organic semiconductors, electronic properties of conjugated polyelectrolytes, interfaces in optoelectronic devices, charge transport in organic semiconductors and biological systems, and device physics. Recognition for her research includes the 2005 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, the 2006 NSF CAREER Award, the 2007 Harold Plous Award, the 2008 Camille Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award, the 2009 Alfred Sloan Research Fellows, the 2010 National Science Foundation American Competitiveness and Innovation Fellows, the 2015 Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Award, the 2016 Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the 2015, 2016, and 2017 World’s Most InfluentialScientific Minds; Top 1% Highly Cited Researchers in Materials Science by Thomson Reuters and Clarivate Analytics. Her current research interests are electronic properties of conjugated polyelectrolytes, doping in organic semiconductors, charge transport in organic semiconductors and biofilms, bioelectronics, and device physics of organic solar cells, ratchets, transistors, and photodetectors.

Professor Kwanghee currently leads research and development program of organic solar cells in Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) as a director of the Research Institute of Solar and Sustainable Energies (RISE). He is also appointed as a “Distinguished Professor” of the School of Materials Science and Engineering of GIST. Dr. Lee started his professorship at Pusan National University in 1997 after finishing his Ph.D. and Post-Doc at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB). Then he moved to GIST in 2007 and have organized and acted as a co-director of the Heeger Center for Advanced Materials (HCAM) together with the director, Professor Alan J. Heeger, who is a 2000 year Nobel Laureate in Chemistry. Now Dr. Lee is a leading scientist in the area of “plastic electronics” including organic solar cells, polymer LEDs, and organic FETs. Dr. Lee finished his B.S. in Nuclear Engineering at Seoul National University and M.S. in Physics at KAIST. Then he earned his Ph.D. in Physics at UCSB (USA) under the guidance of Prof. Heeger with a subject of metallic and semiconducting polymers.

Henry Snaith undertook his PhD at the University of Cambridge, working on organic photovoltaics, then spent two years at the EPFL as a post-doc working on dye-sensitized solar cells. Since 2007 he has held a professorship at the University of Oxford Clarendon Laboratory where his group researches organic, hybrid and perovskite optoelectronic devices. Professor Snaith was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2015, he is a 2017 Clarivate Citation Laureate, and among his awards are the 2017 Royal Society James Joule Medal and Prize. In 2010 he founded Oxford Photovoltaics Ltd. which is commercializing the perovskite solar technology transferred from his laboratory.

Prof. Aron Walsh holds the Chair in Materials Design at Imperial College London. He was awarded his Ph.D in Chemistry from Trinity College Dublin and later worked at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, University College London, and University of Bath. His research combines technique development and applications at the interface between solid-state chemistry and physics. In 2015 he was awarded the EU-40 prize from the Materials Research Society for his work on the theory of solar energy materials. 

Hin-Lap (Angus) Yip is a Professor in the State Key Laboratory of Luminescent Materials and Devices and the Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) Department in South China University of Technology (SCUT). He got his BSc and MPhil degrees in Materials Science from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and completed his PhD degree in MSE in 2008 under the guidance of Prof. Alex Jen at the University of Washington, Seattle. He joined SCUT in 2013 as full Professor. His current research focuses on the use of an integrated approach combining materials, interface, and device engineering to improve both polymer and perovskite optoelectronic devices. He had published more than 200 scientific papers with citations over 20000 and a H-index of 75. He was also honoured as “Highly Cited Researcher” in Materials Science by Thomson Reuters from 2014-2019.