Piers studied for his first degree in Physics at the University of Bristol, graduating in 1998. For his PhD (2002) he investigated the physics of polycrystalline ice at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge. After two Antarctic field seasons (2000/2001 and 2002/2003) drilling and measuring the world�s oldest ice core record recovered from Dome C he moved to the University of New South Wales in Australia. In 2004 he made a change in research direction to develop photoelectrodes for solar water splitting after winning a post-doctoral fellowship with the CSIRO. In 2006 he was awarded an Ig Nobel prize for �calculating the number of photographs that must be taken to (almost) ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed�. Piers returned to the UK (2007) to work as a Research Associate at Imperial College London on interpreting loss mechanisms in dye sensitised solar cells where developed new approaches to simulating and characterising behaviour in this class of devices. In October 2011 he began an EPSRC fellowship at Imperial to measure model and exploit molecular wiring in hybrid optoelectronic devices.

Kylie Catchpole is Professor in the Research School of Engineering at the Australian National University.  She has over 100 scientific publications, with a focus on using new materials and nanotechnology to improve solar cells.  She completed her PhD at ANU and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of New South Wales and the FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics in Amsterdam before returning to ANU in 2008.  In 2013 she was awarded a Future Fellowship from the Australian Research Council and in 2015 she was awarded the John Booker Medal for Engineering Science from the Australian Academy of Science. 

Jacky 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).

Antonio Guerrero is Associate Professor in Applied Physics at the Institute of Advanced Materials (Spain). His background includes synthesis of organic and inorganic materials (PhD in Chemistry). He worked 4 years at Cambridge Dispaly Technology  fabricating materiales for organic light emitting diodes and joined University Jaume I in 2010 to lead the fabrication laboratory of electronic devices. His expertise includes chemical and electrical characterization of several types of electronic devices. In the last years he has focused in solar cells, memristors, electrochemical cells and batteries.

Dr. Evelyne Knapp is a research associate at the Institute of Computational Physics at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Winterthur, Switzerland. She holds a Diploma and Ph.D. degree in Computational Science and Engineering from ETH Zurich.

David Mitzi received a B.S.E. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in 1985 and a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University in 1990. In 1990, he joined the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center and initiated a program examining structure-property relationships, low-cost thin-film deposition techniques and device applications for a variety of electronic materials (e.g., oxides, halides, chalcogenides, organic-inorganic hybrids). Between 2009 and 2014 he managed the Photovoltaic Science and Technology department at IBM, with a focus on developing solution-processed high-performance inorganic semiconductors for thin-film photovoltaic (PV) devices. In July 2015, Dr. Mitzi moved to the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke University as a professor. He holds a number of patents and has authored or coauthored more than 250 papers and book chapters.

Iván Mora-Seró (1974, M. Sc. Physics 1997, Ph. D. Physics 2004) is researcher at Universitat Jaume I de Castelló (Spain). His research during the Ph.D. at Universitat de València (Spain) was centered in the crystal growth of semiconductors II-VI with narrow gap. On February 2002 he joined the University Jaume I. From this date until nowadays his research work has been developed in: electronic transport in nanostructured devices, photovoltaics, photocatalysis, making both experimental and theoretical work. Currently he is associate professor at University Jaume I and he is Principal Researcher (Research Division F4) of the Institute of Advanced Materials (INAM). Recent research activity was focused on new concepts for photovoltaic conversion and light emission based on nanoscaled devices and semiconductor materials following two mean lines: quantum dot solar cells with especial attention to sensitized devices and lead halide perovskite solar cells and LEDs, been this last line probably the current hottest topic in the development of new solar cells.

Paulina Plochocka, Directrice de recherché de 2e classe (DR2) in Laboratoire National des Champs Magnétiques Intenses (LNCMI), CNRS in Toulouse.

P. Plochocka obtained her PhD cum-laude in 2004 at the University of Warsaw working on the dynamics of many-body interactions between carriers in doped semi-magnetic quantum wells (QW). During her first post doc at Weizmann Institute of science, she started working on the electronic properties of a high mobility 2D electron gas in the fractional and integer quantum Hall Effect regime. She continued this topic during second post doc in LNCMI Grenoble, where she was holding individual Marie Curie scholarship. At the same time, she enlarged her interest of 2D materials towards graphene and other layered materials as TMDCs or black phosphorus. In 2012 she obtained permanent position in LNCMI Toulouse, where she created the Quantum Electronics group, which investigates the electronic and optical properties of emerging materials under extreme conditions of high magnetic field and low temperatures. Examples include semiconducting layer materials such as transition metal dichalcogenides, GaAs/AlAs core shell nanowires and organic inorganic hybrid perovskites.

Xiaoyang Zhu is the Howard Family Professor of Nanoscience and a Professor of Chemistry at Columbia University. He received a BS degree from Fudan University in 1984 and a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 1989. After postdoctoral research with Gerhard Ertl at the Fritz-Haber-Institute, he joined the faculty at Southern Illinois University as an Assistant Professor in 1993. In 1997, he moved to the University of Minnesota as a tenured Associate Professor, later a Full Professor, and a Merck endowed professor. In 2009, he returned to the University of Texas at Austin as the Vauquelin Regents Professor and served as directors of the DOE Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) and the Center for Materials Chemistry. In 2013, he moved to Columbia University. His honors include a Dreyfus New Faculty Award from Dreyfus Foundation, a Cottrell Scholar Award from Research Corporation, a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Award from the Humboldt Foundation, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellow Award from DOD, and an Ahmed Zewail Award from the American Chemical Society. Among his professional activities, he serves on the editorial/advisory boards of Accounts of Chemical Research, Science Advances, Chemical Physics, and Progress in Surface Science, and as a scientific advisor to the Fritz-Haber-Institute of the Max-Planck Society and ShanghaiTech University