Halide perovskites exhibit an exceptional combination of properties, strong light absorption, long carrier diffusion lengths and defect tolerance, yet a unified physical picture remains elusive. Growing evidence suggests that the missing piece lies in their dynamic lattice: structure-property relationship that emerge from anharmonicity, local symmetry breaking, and coupled electron-phonon-defect dynamics across multiple length and time scales. This symposium will bring together theory, and experiment to establish how structural dynamics govern transport, stability, and optoelectronic performance in halide perovskites. We will highlight advances in machine-learning-assisted interatomic potentials and large-supercell simulations that capture finite-temperature fluctuations, polaron formation, ion migration pathways, and phonon-limited transport, enabling predictive understanding of key materials metrics such as carrier mobility, thermal conductivity, and non-radiative recombination. Ultrafast spectroscopies will be featured for resolving photoexcited carrier motion, hot-carrier cooling, polaron and exciton formation, and electron-phonon coupling on femtosecond-to-nanosecond timescales. In parallel, direct structural probes, including time-resolved X-ray/electron diffraction and scattering-based methods, will be emphasized for mapping lattice distortion, dynamic disorder and electron-phonon interactions. Ultimately, this symposium will provide a forum for the community to converge on a coherent framework for dynamic perovskites and to identify the next opportunities unlocked by their uniquely disordered crystal lattices. Specific Topics
- Ultrafast Optical Spectroscopy
- Halide Segregation
- Ultrafast X-ray and electron diffraction
- Molecular Dynamics
- Electron-phonon interaction
- Defects in halide perovskites
- Future Applications of Halide Perovskites
Milos is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow (MSCA) at the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, and a Postdoctoral By-Fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge. He currently leads the Materials subgroup, coordinating its activities from material synthesis to advanced structural characterisation techniques, including synchrotron-based X-ray micro-spectroscopy and diffraction, as well as high-resolution electron microscopy. Milos’s research aims to elucidate the complex interplay between unconventional structural dynamics and the optoelectronic response of lead halide perovskites.
He received his BSc and MSc degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Belgrade, Serbia, with his master’s research focusing on the design of novel, lossless metamaterial structures. During his PhD at UNSW, Australia, he applied light, X-ray, and neutron spectroscopic techniques to investigate electron and phonon dynamics in emerging photovoltaic materials.
Prof. Aron Walsh holds the Chair in Materials Design at Imperial College London. He received his PhD in Chemistry from Trinity College Dublin and later worked at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, University College London, and the University of Bath. His research combines technique development and applications at the interface between solid-state chemistry and physics. He was awarded the EU-40 prize from the Materials Research Society for his work on the theory of solar energy materials, and is an Associate Editor for the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Paul ErhartJacky Even was born in Rennes, France, in 1964. He received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Paris VI, Paris, France, in 1992. He was a Research and Teaching Assistant with the University of Rennes I, Rennes, from 1992 to 1999. He has been a Full Professor of optoelectronics with the Institut National des Sciences Appliquées, Rennes,since 1999. He was the head of the Materials and Nanotechnology from 2006 to 2009, and Director of Education of Insa Rennes from 2010 to 2012. He created the FOTON Laboratory Simulation Group in 1999. His main field of activity is the theoretical study of the electronic, optical, and nonlinear properties of semiconductor QW and QD structures, hybrid perovskite materials, and the simulation of optoelectronic and photovoltaic devices. He is a senior member of Institut Universitaire de France (IUF).
Peijun Guo received his B.S. from Tsinghua University with highest honors in 2009, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2011 and 2016, respectively, all in materials science and engineering. After spending three years at Argonne National Lab as an Enrico Fermi Named Postdoc Fellow, Peijun joined the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering at Yale University in year 2020, with his lab hosted under the Energy Sciences Institute on Yale’s west campus. The Guo group develops and employs optical spectroscopy and microscopy to understand the structure-property relationships in emerging soft semiconductors. His lab is also interested in finding new applications of these emerging, solution-processable materials by tailoring light-matter interactions at the nanoscale.
Patanjali Kambhampati. BA Carleton College USA (1992), PHD University of Texas (USA) 1998, PDF University of Texas (USA) 1999 - 2001. Professor of Chemistry McGill University (2003 - present). Research focus of semiconductor nanostructures and femtosecond laser spectroscopy.
Julian received his Ph.D. in solid-state physics from the University of Wollongong under Prof. Roger Lewis, before commencing a postdoc in the photonics group at KU Leuven with financial support from the Belgium government (FWO), where his work focused on nanoscale optical materials. From 2019–2020, he undertook postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley, to work on lattice dynamics and phase transition phenomena within metal halide perovskites. From 2023, Julian commenced an Australian Research Council (ARC) DECRA Fellowship at the School of Mathematics and Physics, at the University of Queensland, and leads a multidisciplinary research team at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN).
Michael Toney is a Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and the Materials Science Program at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is a pioneer in the use of X-ray scattering and spectroscopy for the determination of atomic structure in materials for sustainable energy applications, especially inorganic and organic solar cells, interfacial electrochemistry, and electrochemical energy storage. Toney received his B.S. from Caltech and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Washington. After a NATO Postdoctoral Fellowship in Denmark, he joined the IBM Research Division to focus on the use of X-ray scattering methods for structure determination for polymer thin films and interfaces. He joined the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) in 2003 where he initiated science programs in sustainable energy materials. In 2020, he joined CU Boulder. Toney has reviewed several honors including a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Farrell W Lytle Award and the CU Boulder Deans Performance Award in Research. He is a Thomson Reuters highly cited researchers in Materials Sciences from 2015 – present.
Omer Yaffe is a senior scientist (assistant professor) at the Weizmann Institute of Science.
He investigates the structure-function relationship in functional materials such as semiconductors, ionic-conductors, and ferroelectrics. Specifically, he is interested in phenomena that stems from strongly anharmonic atomic displacements in solids.
He earned his Bachelor's degrees in chemistry and chemical engineering (dual-program) at Ben Gurion University in 2005, followed by a master’s degree in chemical engineering. In 2013, he earned a Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute followed by a postdoctoral term at Columbia University, New York.
Marios Zacharias is a computational materials scientist and currently an Assistant Professor at the Cyprus Institute. Prior to this, he held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellowship at the FOTON Institute, INSA Rennes from 2023-2025. He earned his Ph.D. in Materials Science from the University of Oxford in 2017 and continued there as a postdoctoral researcher. In 2019, he joined the NOMAD Laboratory at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin. From 2020 to 2021, he led the simulation group of RUNMS at the Cyprus University of Technology.
His research focuses on electronic structure theory and high-performance computing for the accurate and high-throughput modelling of anharmonicity, electron-phonon interactions, and vibronic effects in condensed matter systems. He is the developer of the EPW/ZG module in Quantum ESPRESSO and the creator, with Prof. F. Giustino, of the Special Displacement Method (SDM) for finite-temperature electronic structure calculations. Marios has also introduced a method for multiphonon diffuse scattering, enabling the interpretation of thermal and ultrafast phenomena in solids. His current work explores machine learning approaches for efficient simulations of anharmonicity and local disorder in halide and oxide perovskites.