This symposium highlights the importance of material properties in the design, efficiency, and performance of solar energy systems. Our discussions will delve into the advanced synthesis and structure-property relationships of innovative materials such as coordination polymers, metal complexes, and dyes. This deeper understanding of material properties is critical to optimizing the performance of solar cells, solar fuels, and photocatalysts.
Aims at inspiring innovation and foster collaborations focused on advancing the understanding and application of material properties in solar energy technologies. We invite participants globally to delve into the latest research and advancements in material properties, contributing to a more sustainable future.
- Focus on material properties: from synthesis to device performance
- Structure-property relationships in coordination polymers and metal complexes: their role in solar cells and photocatalysis
- Material properties of innovative dyes and chromophores: implications for solar cell performance
- Charge transport dynamics and interface engineering: the material aspect
- Material-driven light management strategies for enhanced solar cell efficiency
- Advanced photocatalysts for solar fuel generation: understanding their material properties
- The role of material properties in the integration of solar cells and solar fuels for sustainable energy solutions
Prof. Marina Freitag is a Professor of Energy and a Royal Society University Research Fellow at Newcastle University. She is developing new light-driven technologies that incorporate coordination polymers to solve the most important challenges in the research area, including issues of sustainability, stability and performance of hybrid PV. The development of such highly innovative concepts has given Marina international recognition, including recipient of the prestigious 2022 Royal Society of Chemistry Harrison-Meldola Memorial Prize 2022.
Her research into hybrid molecular devices, began during her doctoral studies (2007-2011, Rutgers University, NJ, USA) where she was awarded an Electrochemical Society Travel Award and Dean Dissertation Fellowship 2011. Dr Freitag moved to Uppsala University (2013-2015) for a postdoctoral research position, which focused on the implementation of alternative redox mediators, leading to a breakthrough today known as “zombie solar cells”. Dr Freitag was invited to further develop this work at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) with Prof. Anders Hagfeldt ( 2015-2016). From 2016-2020 she was appointed as Assistant Professor at Uppsala University, Sweden, where she received the Göran Gustaffsson Young Researcher Award 2019.
Juan A. Anta is Full Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University Pablo de Olavide, Seville, Spain. He obtained a BA in Chemistry in the Universidad Complutense of Madrid (Spain) and carried out his PhD research at the Physical Chemistry Institut of the National Research Council of Spain. His research focuses on fundamental studies of energy photoconversion processes, especially on dye and perovskite solar cells, using numerical simulation and modelling tools, as well as advanced optoelectronic characterization techniques such as impedance spectroscopy and other small perturbation techniques.
M. Ibrahim Dar is a Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. From 2018 to 2020, he was an Advanced Swiss National Science Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow in the group of Professor Sir Richard Friend, University of Cambridge. Prior to this, he worked as a Post-Doctoral Scientist with Professor Michael Graetzel at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) Switzerland (2014-2018). For his postdoctoral research at EPFL, he was awarded the prestigious Zeno Karl Schindler-EPFL Prize for particular excellence in the field of sustainability and was twice awarded a special prize by the School of Basic Sciences, EPFL, Switzerland. During his PhD, he was awarded the Swiss Government Excellence Research Scholarships for two consecutive years (2012-2014), which allowed him to work in Professor Graetzel’s group as a guest PhD student. Ibrahim’s interdisciplinary research combines solid-state chemistry, physics, and materials science to design and understand new functional materials with desired structural and optoelectronic properties for energy-oriented applications.
Fabrice Odobel (1966) received his Ph.D. in 1994 at Strasbourg University under the supervision of Prof. Jean-Pierre Sauvage. After postdoctoral research with Prof. Ronald Breslow, Columbia University (New York, USA), he joined CNRS as a full-time researcher in 1995. He currently leads the research group in CEISAM laboratory at Nantes University. His research interests include the development of new materials for photovoltaic devices and artificial photosynthesis.
Mary Pryce is a Professor at the School of Cehmical Sciences at Dublin City Universirty, Ireland. Prior to joining DCU in 1997, she was employed as a postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Milan, Italy. She obtained her PhD from Dublin City University in the area of organometallic photochemistry (in 1995). Current research projects within her research group focus on designing new materials (polymers, organometallic compounds or organic dyes) for energy applications such as hydrogen generation, or CO2 conversion. Another aspect of research focuses on antimicrobial materials. Central to both of these research areas is understanding the photophysical properties using time resolved techniques.
Ludmilla is an Associate Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the Univeristy of Oxford. She obtained her B.Sc and M.Sc. degrees from the University of Siegen (Germany). During her undergraduate studies she developed an interest in electrochemistry and semiconductor physics driving her to pursue a M.Sc. project on dye-sensitized solar cells in the group of Professor Michael Grätzel at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland). Staying in the same group, Ludmilla worked on oxide thin film photoelectrodes applied in photoelectrochemical water splitting and perovskite solar cells during her Ph.D. degree which she obtained in 2016. She then joined the group of Professor James Durrant at Imperial College London to study photochemical and photophysical processes in semiconductors using time-resolved spectroscopy and shortly after was awarded the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship (2017-2019). Ludmilla began her independent research career as Imperial College Research Fellow (2019-2021) before moving to Oxford in October 2021. Her research at Oxford aims at the design of atomically defined photo- and electrocatalysts that convert CO2, water and other “waste products” to energy-rich fuels and chemicals with high conversion efficiency, selectivity and long operational stability.