Harry Atwater is the Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science at the California Institute of Technology. Atwater’s scientific interests span light-matter interactions from quantum nanophotonics, two-dimensional materials and metasurfaces to solar photovoltaics and artificial photosynthesis. Atwater is an early pioneer in nanophotonics and plasmonics; he gave the name to the field of plasmonics in 2001. He currently serves as Director of the Liquid Sunlight Alliance, a DOE Solar Fuels Hub project, and was the founding Director of the Resnick Sustainability Institute at Caltech. He also chairs the Breakthrough Starshot Lightsail Committee and is a PI of the Caltech Space Solar Power Project.

Atwater has laid the foundations for plasmonic and negative index metamaterials, as well as tunable nanophotonic materials and metasurfaces. He has pioneered principles for light management and high efficiency solar cell design.  He was the co-founder of Alta Devices, a solar photovoltaics company in Santa Clara, CA that holds the current world records for 1 Sun single and dual junction solar cell efficiency as well as solar module efficiency.

As of October 2020, he has authored or co-authored more than 500 publications and 60 patents cited in aggregate > 70,000 times and marked by citation metrics: h index = 95 (Web of Science) and h = 118 (Google Scholar), and he is an ISI Highly Cited Researcher (2014-2019). His group’s advances in the solar energy and plasmonics field have been reported in Scientific American, Science, Nature Materials, Nature Photonics and Advanced Materials.

Harry Atwater is a Member of US National Academy of Engineering and is also a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Materials Research Society, SPIE and the National Academy of Inventors.  Atwater has been honored by awards including: Kavli Innovations in Chemistry Lecture Award, American Chemical Society (2018); APS David Adler Lectureship for Advances in Materials Physics (2016); Julius Springer Prize in Applied Physics (2014); Fellowship from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (2013); ENI Prize for Renewable and Nonconventional Energy (2012); SPIE Green Photonics Award (2012); MRS Kavli Lecturer in Nanoscience (2010); and the Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award (2010). He also received the Joop Los Fellowship from the Dutch Society for Fundamental Research on Matter (2005), the A.T.&T. Foundation Award (1990), the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award (1989) and the IBM Faculty Development Award in 1989-1990.

He is the founding Editor in Chief for the journal ACS Photonics, and is Associate Editor for the IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics. In 2006 he founded the Gordon Research Conference on Plasmonics, for which he served as chair in 2008.  Professor Atwater has worked extensively as a consultant for industry and government and has actively served the materials community in a variety of roles, including President of the Materials Research Society in 2000, MRS Meeting Chair in 1997, and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Gordon Research Conferences. He also teaches graduate level Applied Physics classes at Caltech in nanophotonics, solid-state physics and device physics.

Professor Atwater received his B. S., M. S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981, 1983 and 1987, respectively. He held the IBM Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University from 1987-88 and has been a member of the Caltech faculty since 1988.

Jun Cheng received his PhD in Chemistry at the Queen’s University Belfast, UK in 2008, and the subject was simulating surface catalysis using density functional theory. He then moved to the University of Cambridge, first as a postdoc for two years developing ab initio molecular dynamics based method for calculation of redox potentials and acidity constants. In 2010-2013, he was awarded a junior research fellowship by Emmanuel College at Cambridge, which granted him freedom to pursue his interest in interfacial electrochemistry. He became a university lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, UK in 2013, and was soon rewarded the major national start-up program fund and took up a full professorship in Xiamen University, China. Over years, his research has shifted from computational surface science and heterogeneous catalysis, to method development in redox and acid-base chemistry, and to ab inito electrochemistry. His recent research interest is combining electronic structure, sampling and machine learning methods for studying chemical dynamics in catalysis and electrochemistry.

Heinz Frei is a Senior Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. He studied chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich and received his doctorate degree at ETH in the Laboratory of Physical Chemistry. After a postdoctoral stay at the Chemistry Department of the University of California at Berkeley, he started a research group in solar photochemistry at LBNL with focus on chemistry with near infrared light, work for which he received the Werner Prize. Over the past two decades, Frei has established new methods for utilizing visible and near infrared light for the environmentally friendly synthesis of useful chemicals, and for the chemical storage of solar photons. Currently, his research effort focuses on the scientific challenges of the direct conversion of carbon dioxide and water to a liquid fuel by artificial photosynthesis. A frequent plenary lecturer at international conferences and member of Department of Energy workshop panels, he has co-organized several symposia of sunlight to fuel conversion in the past few years and has been elected Vice Chair of the Gordon Research Conference on Solar Fuels (2012). He led the Interface Project of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) and is currently Acting Director of the JCAP North Site.

Professor Gu's research focuses on designing novel solid-state and hybrid electrocatalysts for fuel generation, along with investigating and tailoring charge transfer mechanisms at the semiconductor-catalyst interface for solar energy conversion reactions, such as CO₂ reduction, water oxidation, and water reduction.

Thomas E. Mallouk received his bachelor’s degree from Brown University and was a Ph.D. student with Neil Bartlett at the University of California, Berkeley. Following postdoctoral work with Mark Wrighton at MIT he held faculty positions at the University of Texas at Austin and at Penn State University.  He is currently Vagelos Professor in Energy Research in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania.  His research focuses on the synthesis of inorganic materials and their application to solar energy conversion, energy storage, catalysis and electrocatalysis, nano- and microscale motors, low dimensional physical phenomena, and environmental remediation.  He is the author of 450+ publications, including a few good ones.  He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Chemical Society.

Erwin Reisner received his education and professional training at the University of Vienna (with Prof Bernhard K. Keppler), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (with Prof Stephen J. Lippard) and the University of Oxford (with Prof Fraser A. Armstrong) before starting his independent career as a University Lecturer at Cambridge and Fellow of St. John’s College in 2010. He holds an EPSRC Career Acceleration Fellowship and heads the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Sustainable SynGas Chemistry. His group develops artificial photosynthesis by combining chemical biology, synthetic chemistry and materials chemistry.

Since 2017 Beatriz Roldan Cuenya has been a Director at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin (Germany). There she heads the Department of Interface Science. She moved from the Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany), where she became a professor of Physics in 2013. Prior to that, Beatriz Roldan Cuenya was a professor of Physics at University of Central Florida (USA).

She carried out her postdoctoral research in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of California Santa Barbara (2001-2003). Prof. Roldan obtained her PhD in Physics from the University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany) summa cum laude in 2001. She completed her M.S./B.S. in Physics with a minor in Materials Science at the University of Oviedo, Spain in 1998. During her academic career Prof. Roldan received an Early CAREER Award from the US National Science Foundation (2005) and the international Peter Mark Memorial award from the American Vacuum Society (2009). She is the author of more than 110 peer-reviewed publications and 3 book chapters and has given over 100 invited talks. She presently serves as Associate Editor of ACS Catalysis, in the editorial advisory board of the Surface Science journal and in the Advisory Committee of the Office of Basic Energy Sciences of the US Department of Energy.

Prof. Roldan’s research program explores the novel physical and chemical properties of size and shape-selected nanostructured materials, with emphasis on advancing the field of nanocatalysis through in situ and operando characterization of catalysts at work.

Jan Rossmeisl is Professor of theoretical chemistry at Department of Chemistry and the Nano-Science center at Copenhagen University. Before joining University of Copenhagen in April 2015, Jan was an Associate Professor and group leader for the theoretical catalysis group at Department of Physics at the Technical University of Denmark Jan holds master’s (2000) and Ph.D (2004) degrees in physics from the Technical University of Denmark. Since 2007 supervisor of more than 20 Ph.D and Post docs. Coauthor of more than 110 publications in peer reviewed journals, co-inventor of 4 patents and co-founder of two startup Companies. Research interests includes: electrocatalysis, energy conversion, atomic scale simulations, rational interface design for catalysis.

The author was graduated from Osaka University in 1978 and received Ph.D from Osaka University in 1983. He joined R&D Center in Toshiba from 1978 to 2000, during which the author was engaged in development of ULSI lithography, solar cells direct methanol fuel cells, and polysilane. He joined polysilane research in Robert West group of Wisconsin University (US) from 1988 to 1990. He was a professor of Kyushu Institute of Technology (National Institute) since 2001. From 2019, the author is a professor in The University of Electro-Communications in Japan. His research interest is printable solar cells.

Maria Antonietta Loi studied physics at the University of Cagliari in Italy where she received the PhD in 2001. In the same year she joined the Linz Institute for Organic Solar cells, of the University of Linz, Austria as a post doctoral fellow. Later she worked as researcher at the Institute for Nanostructured Materials of the Italian National Research Council in Bologna Italy. In 2006 she became assistant professor and Rosalind Franklin Fellow at the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials of the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. She is now full professor in the same institution and chair of the Photophysics and OptoElectronics group. She has published more than 130 peer review articles in photophysics and optoelectronics of nanomaterials. In 2012 she has received an ERC starting grant.

Annamaria Petrozza received her PhD in Physics from the University of Cambridge (UK) in 2008 with a thesis on the study of optoelectronic processes at organic and hybrid semiconductors interfaces under the supervision of Dr. J.S. Kim and Prof Sir R.H. Friend. From July 2008 to December 2009 she worked as research scientist at the Sharp Laboratories of Europe, Ltd on the development of new market competitive solar cell technologies (Dye Sensitized Solar cells/Colloidal Quantum Dots Sensitized Solar cells). Since January 2010 she has a Team Leader position at the Center for Nano Science and Technology -IIT@POLIMI. She is in charge of the development of photovoltaic devices and their characterization by time-resolved and cw Photoinduced Absorption Spectroscopy, Time-resolved Photoluminescence and electrical measurements. Her research work mainly aims to shed light on interfacial optoelectronic mechanisms, which are fundamental for the optimization of operational processes, with the goal of improving device efficiency and stability.

2010- Associate Professor (Kyoto University) 2003–2010 Assistant Professor (Nagoya University) 2003 Ph D. Kyoto Univeristy 2000 Visiting Student (Boston College, USA) 1998 B Kyoto Univeristy

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.

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.

Marc T.M. Koper is Professor of Surface Chemistry and Catalysis at Leiden University, The Netherlands. He received his PhD degree (1994) from Utrecht University (The Netherlands) in the field of electrochemistry. He was an EU Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the University of Ulm (Germany) and a Fellow of Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) at Eindhoven University of Technology, before moving to Leiden University in 2005. His main research interests are in fundamental aspects of electrocatalysis, proton-coupled electron transfer, theoretical electrochemistry, and electrochemical surface science.

Marina Leite is an Associate Professor in Materials Science and Engineering at UC Davis. Her group is engaged in fundamental and applied research in hybrid perovskites for optoelectronics, functional imaging of devices through advanced scanning probe microscopy methods, and optical materials. She has delivered >130 invited talks at conferences and research institutions around the globe. Leite is the awardee of the 2016 APS Ovshinsky Sustainable Energy Fellowship from the American Physical Society (APS) and of the 2014 Maryland Academy of Sciences Outstanding Young Scientist Award. Before joining UC Davis, Leite was an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland. She also worked for two years at NIST and was a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech.

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.

Sandheep Ravishankar completed his PhD on the electrical modelling of physical mechanisms of operation of perovskite solar cells at the institute of advanced materials (INAM), Universitat Jaume I, Castellon, Spain. He is currently a researcher at IEK-5, Forschungszentrum Juelich, Germany, in the department of analytics and simulation. His primary research interest is the characterization of loss mechanisms in perovskite solar cells using a mixture of capacitance and luminescence-based techniques, supplemented by simulations. His secondary research interest is the characterization of kinetics and physical processes occurring in photoelectrochemical devices for water splitting.

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 180 papers and book chapters.

Bachelor in Chemistry from University of São Paulo (USP) in 1996, Master's Degree in Chemistry from  University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in 1998 and Doctorate in Chemistry from UNICAMP in 2001 under the guidance of Prof. Marco-Aurelio De Paoli. Performed an internship during the Doctorate at Imperial College in London under the supervision of Prof. James R. Durrant. After completing his doctorate he also held a post-doctorate position at Imperial College in the same research group. In 2003, he held another postdoctoral program at USP under the supervision of Prof. Henrique Toma. He is currently Professor of the Chemistry Institute of UNICAMP. He has experience in the field of Chemistry, with emphasis in the application of nanomaterials in Solar Energy Conversion, working mainly in the following subjects: inorganic nanoparticles of chalcogenides and perovskite (quantum dots) in light emitting diodes (LED); photocatalytic oxide / graphene nanocomposites for the generation of hydrogen and direct conversion of CO2 into solar fuels; emerging solar cells (in particular TiO2 / dye cells and perovskite solar cells). In 2017 he held a sabbatical at SLAC-Stanford in the field of application of Synchrotron light in the characterization of materials for energy conversion. Published more than 115 papers, 3 patents, 1 book and 7 book chapters. She is the leader of the reserach on emerging photovoltaics in Latin America.

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.

Carlos Silva earned a PhD in chemical physics from the University of Minnesota, with the late Professor Paul Barbara. His graduate research focused on ultrafast polar solvation dynamics, probed by transient absorption spectroscopy on the solvated electron and transition-metal mixed-valence complexes. Following his graduate degree in 1998, he was Postdoctoral Research Fellow with Professor Sir Richard Friend at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, where he developed an ultrafast spectroscopy laboratory to investigate the photophysics of conjugated polymers and related organic semiconductors. In 2001, he began his independent academic career as Advanced Research Fellow of the UK Engineering and Physical Science Research Council at the Cavendish Laboratory, and simultaneously became Research Fellow in Darwin College, University of Cambridge. He moved to the Université de Montréal with a Canada Research Chair in 2005, where he developed an ultrafast spectroscopy laboratory for the study of electronic processes in organic semiconductor materials. In recognition of his rising international leadership, he was awarded the 2010 Herzberg Medal and the 2016 Brockhouse Medal by the Canadian Association of Physicists. Since 2017, Carlos’s research career at Georgia Tech has built on his previous research experiences to bring innovative optical probes of organic and hybrid organic-inorganic semiconductor materials. His research program exploits a range of spectroscopic techniques, including nonlinear ultrafast spectroscopies such as two-dimensional coherent excitation spectroscopies, and quantum spectroscopy, in which quantum properties of light are exploited to unravel light-matter interactions with intricate detail. These techniques are applied to understand key electronic processes in a wide range of materials, with many target applications in optoelectronics, on timescales ranging from femtoseconds to milliseconds. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

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. 

Professor of Physical Chemistry at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) Michael Graetzel, PhD, directs there the Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces. He pioneered research on energy and electron transfer reactions in mesoscopic systems and their use to generate electricity and fuels from sunlight. He invented mesoscopic injection solar cells, one key embodiment of which is the dye-sensitized solar cell (DSC).  DSCs are meanwhile commercially produced at the multi-MW-scale and created a number of new applications in particular as lightweight power supplies for portable electronic devices and in photovoltaic glazings. They engendered the field of perovskite solar cells (PSCs) that turned our to be the most exciting break-through in the recent history of photovoltaics. He received a number of prestigious awards, of which the most recent ones include the RusNANO Prize, the Zewail Prize in Molecular Science, the Global Energy Prize, the Millennium Technology Grand Prize, the Samson Prime Minister’s Prize for Innovation in Alternative Fuels, the Marcel Benoist Prize, the King Faisal International Science Prize, the Einstein World Award of Science and the Balzan Prize. He is a Fellow of several learned societies and holds eleven honorary doctor’s degrees from European and Asian Universities. According to the ISI-Web of Science, his over 1500 publications have received some 230’000 citations with an h-factor of 219 demonstrating the strong impact of his scientific work.

 

Professor Shengzhong (Frank) Liu received his PhD from Northwestern University in 1992. Upon completing his postdoctoral research at Argonne National Laboratory in 1994, he joined high-tech industrial research, most notably on solar cells with Solarex/BP Solar and United Solar Ovonic. His research focuses on perovskite solar cells, optoelectronic devices, single-crystalline perovskite materials, high efficiency HIT solar cells, nanoscale thin film materials and photocatalyst for photoelectrochemical water splitting. He has published more than 100 papers in peer-reviewed journals including Science, Nature, Nature Communications, Energy & Environ. Sci., Adv. Mater., Sci. Adv., Phys. Rev. X. He was recruited into the Chinese National “1000-Talent Program”in 2011 and now he is a professor at Shaanxi Normal University and Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Michael D. McGehee is a Professor in the Chemical and Biological Engineering Department at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the Associate Director of the Materials Science and Engineering Program and has a joint appointment at the National Renewable Energy Lab. He was a professor in the Materials Science and Engineering Department at Stanford University for 18 years and a Senior Fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy. His current research interests are developing new materials for smart windows and solar cells. He has previously done research on polymer lasers, light-emitting diodes and transistors as well as transparent electrodes made from carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires. His group makes materials and devices, performs a wide variety of characterization techniques, models devices and assesses long-term stability. He received his undergraduate degree in physics from Princeton University and his PhD degree in Materials Science from the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Dr. Md. K. Nazeeruddin received M.Sc. and Ph. D. in inorganic chemistry from Osmania University, Hyderabad, India. His current research focuses on Dye-sensitized solar cells, Hydrogen production, Light-emitting diodes and Chemical sensors. He has published more than 400 peer-reviewed papers, nine book chapters, and inventor of 49 patents. The high impact of his work has been recognized with invitations to speak at over 100 international conferences. He appeared in the ISI listing of most cited chemists, and has more than 10000 citations with an h-index of 93. He is directing, and managing several industrial, national, and European Union projects on Hydrogen energy, Photovoltaics (DSC), and Organic Light Emitting Diodes. He was awarded EPFL Excellence prize in 1998 and 2006, Brazilian FAPESP Fellowship in 1999, Japanese Government Science & Technology Agency Fellowship, in 1998, Government of India National Fellowship in 1987-1988. Recently he has been appointed as World Class University (WCU) professor for the period of March 1, 2009 ~ December 31, 2012 by the Korea University, Jochiwon, Korea.

Sang Il Seok is currently a Distinguished Professor at the School of Energy and Chemical Engineering, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), Korea. Before he joined UNIST in 2015, he served on the principle investigater of Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology and professor at department of energy science, Sungkyunkwan University. In 2017, he was appointed as guest professor of Nankai University in China. He obtained his PhD degree at Department of Inorganic Materials Engineering of Seoul National University, Korea, in 1995. From 1996 to 1997, he experienced a post-doc to investigate defects and transport in Fe-Ti-O Spinel structure in Cornell University, USA, and visiting scholar in University of Surrey, UK, in 2003, and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, in 2006 respectively. His major research interests were functional inorganic-organic hybrid materials through solution process for optical amplifier, high dielectrics, corrosion-resistance coatings etc. Now, his research focus is based on inorganic-organic hybrid solar cells, in particular perovskite solar cells. He published more than 150 peer-reviewed papers including Nature, Science etc. with several awards for his Excellency.

Kai Zhu is currently a senior scientist in the Chemistry and Nanoscience Center at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). He received his PhD degree in physics from Syracuse University in 2003. Before this position, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Basic Science Center at NREL, focusing on fundamental charge carrier conduction and recombination in photoelectrochemical cells, especially dye-sensitized solar cells. Dr. Zhu’s research on dye-sensitized solar cells involves the development of advanced electrode materials/architectures, basic understanding of charge transport and recombination processes in these electrodes, and thin-film solar cell development/characterization/modeling. His recent research has centered on both basic and applied research on perovskite solar cells, including perovskite material development, device fabrication and characterization, and basic understanding of charge carrier dynamics in these cells. In addition to solar conversion applications, his research interests have also included III-Nitride wide-bandgap semiconductors for high-power blue and UV light emitting diodes and ordered nanostructured electrodes for Li-ion batteries and supercapacitors.

Prof. Paul V. Braun is the Director of the Materials Research Laboratory, the Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering, and Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. He also has a co-appointment as a Professor in Chemistry and is affiliated with the Department of Mechanical Sciences and Engineering and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. Prof. Braun has co-authored a book, about 300 peer-reviewed publications, been awarded multiple patents, and has co-founded three companies. He is the recipient of the Illinois MatSE Young Alumnus Award (2011), the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2010), the Stanley H. Pierce Faculty Award (2010), the 2002 Robert Lansing Hardy Award from TMS, a Beckman Young Investigator Award (2001), a 3M Nontenured Faculty Award (2001), the Xerox Award for Faculty Research (2004, 2009), and multiple teaching awards. He is a Fellow of the Materials Research Society and AAAS.

Emiliano holds a W2 tenure-track professorship at the Physics Department in LMU Munich and is the academic lead of the Plasmonic Chemistry Group. He is also a visiting researcher at the Chemistry Department, University College London, UK, and at the Physics Department, Imperial College London, UK.

His research interests lie at the interface between chemistry and physics, and focus on the development of novel nanomaterials and techniques, specifically for applications in energy conversion.

Emiliano studied chemistry at the National University of La Plata in Argentina. He was one of the founders of Nanodetection, a start-up company based on plasmonic sensing. He was also a Marie-Skłodowska-Curie research fellow at Imperial College London. In 2018, he was awarded with the ERC Starting Grant from the European Commission for his project CATALIGHT.

He is currently a Principal Investigator (PI) of two German excellence research clusters, Nanoinitiative Munich (NIM) and e-conversion; member of the Munich-based Centre for NanoScience (CeNS) and the Bavarian program Solar Technologies go Hybrid (SolTech). Since March 2019, Emiliano is also a member of the Young Academy of Europe (YAE) and he is currently co-editing the first book in Plasmonic Catalysis (Wiley, Apr. 2021).

 

Marjolein Dijkstra is full professor (2007) in the Debye Institute for Nanomaterials Science at Utrecht University. She received a MSc degree in Molecular Sciences at Wageningen University as well as in Physics at Utrecht University. She obtained her PhD degree from Utrecht University in 1994, and was awarded twice a prestigious EU Marie-Curie Individual Fellowship to join the Physical and Theoretical Chemistry group at Oxford University and the H.H. Wills Physics Laboratory at Bristol University.

In 1999, she started her own research line at Utrecht University on obtaining a fundamental understanding on how colloidal building blocks self-assemble and how the self-assembly process can be manipulated by external fields such as gravity, templates, air-liquid or liquid-liquid interfaces, and electric fields. Her group employs Monte Carlo, (event driven) Molecular and Brownian Dynamics simulations, Stochastic Rotational Dynamics simulations to include hydrodynamics, Umbrella and Forward flux sampling, free-energy calculations based on thermodynamic integration methods, and simulated annealing techniques, and more recently machine learning techniques, to determine the (non)-equilibrium phase behavior of colloids, nanoparticles, and liquid crystals.

She is recipient of the Minerva Prize (2000), a high-potential grant (2004), a prestigious NWO VICI and Aspasia grant (2006), and an ERC advanced grant (2020), and is elected as a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). She is (vice) director of the Debye Institute for Nanomaterials Science, (consulting) editor of Reviews of Modern Physics, Physical Review X, and Molecular Physics, and has organised several international conferences and workshops.

Cherie R. Kagan is the Stephen J. Angello Professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and Professor of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. Kagan graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991 with a BSE in Materials Science and Engineering and a BA Mathematics. She earned her PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996 working with Moungi G. Bawendi. In 1996, she went to Bell Labs as a postdoctoral fellow and in 1998, she joined IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center, where she most recently managed the “Molecular Assemblies and Devices Group.” In 2007, she joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. Kagan is an Associate Editor of ACS Nano and serves on the editorial boards of Nano Letters and NanoToday. The Kagan group’s research interests are in the chemical and physical properties of nanostructured and organic materials and in integrating these materials in electronic, optoelectronic, optical, thermoelectric and bioelectronic devices. The group combines the flexibility of chemistry and bottom-up assembly with top-down fabrication techniques to design novel materials and devices. The group explores the structure and function of these materials and devices using spatially- and temporally-resolved optical spectroscopies, AC and DC electrical techniques, electrochemistry, scanning probe and electron microscopies and analytical measurements. Kagan is co-director of The Penn Center for Energy Innovation and serves on the World Economic Forum, Global Agenda Council on Nanotechnology; on the Department of Energy, Basic Energy Sciences Materials Council; and on the advisory board of the US Summer Schools in Condensed Matter and Materials Physics. She served on the Materials Research Society’s Board of Directors from 2007-2009 and the editorial board of the ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces from 2008-2011

Laura Na Liu is a full professor at the Kirchhoff Institute for Physics at University of Heidelberg, Germany. She received her Ph. D in Physics at University of Stuttgart in 2009, working on 3D complex plasmonics at optical frequencies. In 2010, she worked as postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2011, she joined Rice University as Texas Instruments visiting professor. At the end of 2012, she obtained a Sofja Kovalevskaja Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and became an independent group leader at the Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. She joined University of Heidelberg in 2015. Her research interest is multi-disciplinary. She works at the interface between nanophotonics, biology, and chemistry. Her group focuses on developing sophisticated and smart optical nanosystems for answering structural biology questions as well as catalytic chemistry questions in local environments.

Ph. D. in Chemistry from the University of Vigo (Spain). She is currently Assoc. Prof at CINBIO-Department of Physical Chemistry. Since 2012, she is the leader of the Colloid Chemistry Group. Her current interest involves the synthesis, assembly and surface modification of nanoparticles with unique properties as well as development of (multi)functional nanostructured materials and tools with applicability in nanoplasmonics, (bio)sensing, catalysis and biomedicine.

Detlef Smilgies studied physics at Goettingen University in Germany and received a Ph. D. in surface science at the Max-Planck-Institute for Fluid Dynamics, Goettingen in 1991. After postdocs in the US and in Denmark, he worked as a beamline scientist at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France and at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source in Ithaca, NY, USA. He presently is a visiting scientist at Binghamton University and an adjunct professor of chemical engineering at Cornell University. His research interests are in self-assembly in thin films of soft materials, nanoscience, organic electronics, and materials processing from the liquid phase using real-time in-situ grazing-incidence x-ray scattering.

Mona Tréguer-Delapierre received her PhD degree in physical chemistry from the University of Orsay, Paris Saclay. She has received an award from the Chancellerie des Universités de Paris for her PhD thesis. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana (USA) with Dan Meisel, she joined the faculty in the Chemistry Department at the University of Bordeaux, in 2000. Her research is centered on the fabrication of nanomaterials for catalysis, biology and optics. She has published 100 papers in international journals including Nature, Nanoletters, ACS Nano, Phys.Rev.Lett., Adv.Mat, Material Horizons. She co-edited 3 book chapters and held 12 Patents. Recently, she was awarded as the H&M Zimmer Scholar from the University of Cincinnati (USA).

Peter Reiss is researcher at the Institute of Nanoscience & Cryogenics, CEA Grenoble, and Head of Laboratory of Molecular, Organic and Hybrid Electronics (LEMOH). He graduated (1997) from University of Karlsruhe, Germany, and earned his PhD in inorganic chemistry under the supervision of Prof. Dieter Fenske (2000). His research activities focus on the development of synthesis methods for different kinds of colloidal nanocrystals and semiconductor nanowires, the surface functionalization of nanocrystals by “tailor-made” ligands resulting in novel nanoscale building blocks and the assembly of these building blocks into structurally controlled functional materials for optoelectronics. The studied applications range from fluorescent markers for biological labelling and detection over the development of efficient emitters for LEDs and displays to new strategies for nanocrystal based energy conversion and storage. Dr. Reiss acts as Associate Editor for Nanoscale Research Letters and Journal of Nanomaterials and co-organizes the international conference series « NaNaX – Nanoscience with Nanocrystals ».

Ted Sargent received the B.Sc.Eng. (Engineering Physics) from Queen's University in 1995 and the Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (Photonics) from the University of Toronto in 1998. He holds the rank of Professor in the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto, where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Nanotechnology and serves as a KAUST Investigator. His book The Dance of Molecules: How Nanotechnology is Changing Our Lives (Penguin) was published in Canada and the United States in 2005 and has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Korean, and Arabic. He is founder and CTO of InVisage Technologies, Inc. He is a Fellow of the AAAS “...for distinguished contributions to the development of solar cells and light sensors based on solution-processed semiconductors.” He is a Fellow of the IEEE “... for contributions to colloidal quantum dot optoelectronic devices.”

Dmitri Talapin is a Professor of Chemistry at University of Chicago. His research interests revolve around inorganic nanomaterials, spanning from synthetic methodology to device fabrication, with the desire of turning colloidal nanostructures into competitive materials for electronics and optoelectronics. He received his doctorate degree from University of Hamburg, Germany in 2002 under supervision of Horst Weller. In 2003 he joined IBM Research Division at T. J. Watson Research Center as a postdoctoral fellow to work with Chris Murray on synthesis and self-assembly of semiconductor nanostructures. In 2005 he moved to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a staff scientist at the Molecular Foundry and finally joined faculty at the University of Chicago in 2007. His recent recognitions include MRS Outstanding Young Investigator Award (2011); Camille Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award (2010); David and Lucile Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering (2009); NSF CAREER Award (2009) and Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2009).

Raffaella Buonsanti obtained her PhD in Nanochemistry in 2010 at the National Nanotechnology Laboratory, University of Salento. Then, she moved to the US where she spent over five years at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, first as a postdoc and project scientist at the Molecular Foundry and after as a tenure-track staff scientist in the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis. In October 2015 she started as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering at EPFL. She is passionate about materials chemistry, nanocrystals, understanding nucleation and growth mechanisms, energy, chemical transformations.

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I obtained my PhD degree in applied physics at Ghent University in 2009, studying near-infrared lead salt quantum dots. This was followed by a postdoc on quantum dot emission dynamics at Ghent University in collaboration with the IBM Zurich research lab. In 2012 I joined the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, where I led the Nanocrystal Photonics Lab in the Nanochemistry Department. In 2017 I returned to Ghent University as associate professor, focusing mostly on 2D and strained nanocrystals. The research in our group ranges from the synthesis of novel fluorescent nanocrystals to optical spectroscopy and photonic applications.

David J. Norris is currently the Director of the Optical Materials Engineering Laboratory and Professor of Materials Engineering at ETH Zurich. He received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Chemistry from the University of Chicago (1990) and MIT (1995), respectively. After an NSF postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Diego, he joined the NEC Research Institute in Princeton in 1997 where he led a photonics research group. He then became an Associate Professor (2001-2006) and Professor (2006-2010) of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Minnesota. In 2010, he moved to his current position at ETH Zurich. Prof. Norris is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received the Golden Owl award at ETH in 2012 for excellence in teaching. He was awarded an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (2014-2019). In 2015, he was the recipient of the Max R�ssler Prize.

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.

Ivan Scheblykin obtained Ph.D. in 1999 from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and Lebedev Physical Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences on exciton dynamics in J-aggregates. After a postdoctoral stay in the KU Leuven, Belgium, he moved to Sweden to start the single molecule spectroscopy group at the Division of Chemical Physics in Lund University where he became a full professor in 2014. His interests cover fundamental photophysics of organic and inorganic semiconductors and, in particular, energy transfer, charge migration and trapping. The general direction of his research is to comprehend fundamental physical and chemical processes beyond ensemble averaging in material science and chemical physics using techniques inspired by single molecule fluorescence spectroscopy and single particle imaging.

Felix (Phil) Castellano earned a B.A. in Chemistry from Clark University in 1991 and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Johns Hopkins University in 1996. Following an NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Maryland, School of Medicine, he accepted a position as Assistant Professor at Bowling Green State University in 1998. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2004, to Professor in 2006, and was appointed Director of the Center for Photochemical Sciences in 2011. In 2013, he moved his research program to North Carolina State University where he is currently the Goodnight Innovation Distinguished Chair. He was appointed as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) in 2015. His current research focuses on metal-organic chromophore photophysics and energy transfer, photochemical upconversion phenomena, solar fuels photocatalysis, energy transduction at semiconductor/molecular interfaces, photoredox catalysis, and excited state electron transfer processes.     

Dirk M. Guldi completed both his undergraduate studies (1988) and PhD (1990) at the University of Cologne (Germany). Following postdoctoral appointments at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (USA), the Hahn-Meitner Institute Berlin (1992), and Syracuse University, he joined the faculty of the Notre Dame Radiation Laboratory in 1995. He was promoted a year later from assistant to associate professional specialist, and remained affiliated to Notre Dame until 2004. Since 2004, he is Full Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Pharmacy at the Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen. Since 2018, Dirk M. Guldi is Co-Editor in Chief of Nanoscale and Nanoscale Horizons and he has been named among the world’s Highly Cited Researchers by Thomson Reuters.

The Guldi group and its network belong to the cutting edge of worldwide research in solar-energy conversion with expertise not only in advanced photon- and charge-management, but also in the synthesis of tailored materials and molecular modeling. Impressive documentations of their accomplishments are more than 700 peer-reviewed publications, nearly 40,000 citations, and an h-index of 100. At the heart is always a multifaceted and interdisciplinary research program, where his group designs, conceptually devises, synthesizes, tests, and characterizes novel nanometer scale materials with the objective of using them in solar energy conversion schemes. A broad range of spectroscopic (i.e. time-resolved and steady-state measurements with spectrophotometric detection covering a time range from femtoseconds to minutes) and microscopic techniques (i.e. scanning probe microscopy, electron microscopy) are routinely employed to address aspects that correspond to the optimization and fine-tuning of dynamics and/or efficiencies of charge separation, charge transport, charge shift, and charge recombination processes.

Jianzhang Zhao earned a Ph.D. degree from the Department of Chemistry at Jilin University in 2000. After postdoctoral
research at the Pohang University of Science and Technology (South Korea), the Max Planck Research Unit for Enzymology of Protein Folding (Halle, Germany) and the University of Bath (UK), he took up the current position of Professor at the Dalian University of Technology in 2005. His research interests are studying the charge separation, intersystem crossing and electron spin dynamics of organic materials with femtosecond/nanosecond transient absorption spectroscopic methods, and time-resolved electron paramagnetic resonance (TREPR) spectroscopy.

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.

Feng Li completed his PhD studies at Jilin University in 2003, followed by postdoctoral studies at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. Then he returned to Jilin University in 2005 as an Associate Professor of Chemistry and promoted to full Professor in 2008. From 2017 to 2019, He was an Academic Visitor of Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. His research focuses on organic optoelectronic materials and devices based on some new concepts, for example the OLEDs in which the emission comes from doublet exciton. In 2019, He won the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars of China.

Professor Meredith is professor of materials physics at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. He is currently an Australian Research Council Discovery Outstanding Research Award Fellow, co-director of the Centre for Organic Photonics and Electronics, and Director of the UQ Solar Initiative. His research involves the development of new sustainable high-tech materials for applications such as solar energy and bioelectronics, and he particularly specialises in the transport physics and electro-optics of disordered semiconductors. Professor Meredith is also the co-founder of several start-up companies including XeroCoat and Brisbane Materials Technology. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the Premier of Queensland’s Sustainability Award (2013) and is widely recognised for his contributions to innovation and the promotion of renewable energy in Australia. He serves on several advisory boards including the Premier of Queensland’s Climate Change Council, the Australian Solar Thermal Research Initiative Strategic Advisory Board, and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency Technical Advisory Board. He originally hails from South Wales, was educated at Swansea University and Heriot-Watt University, and was DTI Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge before spending 6 years as an industrial scientist with Proctor and Gamble.

Jenny Nelson is a Professor of Physics at Imperial College London, where she has researched novel varieties of material for use in solar cells since 1989. Her current research is focussed on understanding the properties of molecular semiconductor materials and their application to organic solar cells. This work combines fundamental electrical, spectroscopic and structural studies of molecular electronic materials with numerical modelling and device studies, with the aim of optimising the performance of plastic solar cells. She has published around 200 articles in peer reviewed journals, several book chapters and a book on the physics of solar cells.

Bettina Lotsch is the Director of the Nanochemistry Department at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research (MPI-FKF) in Stuttgart, Germany. She studied Chemistry at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) and the University of Oxford and received her PhD from LMU Munich in 2006. After a postdoctoral stay at the University of Toronto she became professor at LMU Munich in 2009 and was appointed Director at MPI-FKF in 2017. Bettina also holds honorary professorships at LMU Munich and the University of Stuttgart, and is PI of the Munich-based Cluster of Excellence e-conversion.

Bettina’s research explores the rational synthesis of new materials by combining the tools of molecular, solid-state and nanochemistry. Current research interests include molecular frameworks for solar energy conversion and storage, solid electrolytes for all-solid-state batteries, and “smart” photonic crystals for optical sensing.

Bettina was awarded an ERC Starting Grant (2014) and has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2014. Her work has been recognized by a number of awards, including the EU-40 Materials Prize 2017 of the European Materials Research Society.

Katherine was born and raised in Eastern Ukraine, and moved with her family to the state of Rhode Island during her freshman year in high school.  She attended Boston College, where she developed a passion for Materials Chemistry, working in the laboratory of Lawrence T. Scott.  She graduated with high honors in 2004, and later that year moved across the river to pursue graduate studies at Harvard University.  In 2011, Katherine earned her Ph.D. in Chemistry from Harvard University under the guidance of George M. Whitesides. Her doctoral dissertation focused on the development and characterization of a simple and portable method that used magnetic levitation for density-based chemical analysis. She also contributed to several other research efforts in the areas of paper-based diagnostics and protein biophysics.  Katherine then joined the laboratory of Timothy M. Swager at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an NIH postdoctoral fellow to pursue the development of portable electronic carbon-based chemical sensors for the detection of hazardous gases and vapors.  At MIT, she developed a solvent-free approach, operationally analogous to drawing with pencil on paper, for the fabrication of sensitive and selective sensors from carbon nanomaterials. Katherine began her independent scientific career as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Dartmouth College in July 2015. She is a recipient of the Army Research Office Young Investigator Award (2017), Sloan Research Fellowship (2018), 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award (2018-2019), and Cottrell Scholars Award (2019).

Melepurath Deepa received her PhD in Applied Chemistry from Delhi University, India in 2004. Thereafter, she worked as a Scientist in the Electronic Materials Division at CSIR-National Physical Laboratory. In November 2009, she joined the Department of Chemistry at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, and she is currently an Associate Professor and the Head of the Department. Her present research is focused on designing and developing new photoanode and counter electrode architectures for quantum dot solar cells, conducting polymer composites for electrochromic devices and pseudocapacitors, and novel electrode materials for Li-based batteries. She has been a recipient of the CSIR Young Scientist Award in Chemical Sciences (2008), NASI - Young Scientist Platinum Jubilee Award in Chemical Sciences (2010), and the B. M. Birla Science Prize in Chemical Sciences (2013). She has published 125 research articles in peer reviewed SCI journals, contributed to 3 book chapters and filed 4 patents, and has an h-index of 35.

Aldo Di Carlo is Full Professor of Optoelectronics and Nanoelectronics at the Department of Electronics Engineering of the University of ROme "Tor Vergata". His research focuses on the study and fabrication of electronic and optoelectronic devices, their analysis and their optimization. Di Carlo is Director of the Center for Hybrid and Organic Solar Cells (CHOSE) which involve more than 30 researchers dealing with the development of organic solar cells (DSC, OPV and Perovskite) and on scaling-up of these technologies for industrial applications. CHOSE has generated 5 spin-off company and a public/private partnership. Di Carlo is author/coauthor of more than 300 scientific publications in international journals, 13 patents and has been involved in several EU projects (two as EU coordinator)

Elena Galoppini was born in Pisa, Italy. She received a Laurea in Chimica from the Università di Pisa, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (synthesis and reactivity of ethynylcubanes, strained cage molecules). She was then a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, where she synthesized and studied the effect of the helix dipole on electron transfer processes in donor-spacer-acceptor systems made from peptides. She joined as Assistant Professor the Chemistry Department at Rutgers University-Newark, where she is Distingushed Professor since 2017. She a the recipent  of  the 2019 Rutgers Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Research and has authored over 100 papers and review articles. The research interests of her group are centered on the design and synthesis of model chromophoric compounds to study electronic processes on nanostructured semiconductor materials. This research finds application in the development of functional nanomaterials, including new types of solar cells, electrochromic windows and biosensors.

Kenneth Hanson received a B.S. in Chemistry from Saint Cloud State University (2005), his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California (2010), followed by an appointment as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2010–2013). His independent research career began in 2013 at Florida State University as a member of the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry and is affiliated with the Materials Science & Engineering program. His current research interests include the design, synthesis, and characterization of photoactive molecules/materials with particular emphasis on manipulating energy and electron-transfer dynamics at organic–inorganic interfaces using multilayer self-assembly.

 

Suraj Soman received his PhD in Chemistry from Dublin City University, Ireland in 2012 followed by post-doctoral tenure at Michigan State University, USA. He joined CSIR-NIIST in 2014 and is currently working as Scientist at Chemical Science & Technology Division. His prime research focus is to address basic science issues related to Dye-sensitized Solar Cells (DSCs) for indoor photovoltaics (IPV) & BIPV applications using new generation copper electrolytes. His interdisciplinary research group focuses on establishing structure-function relationships by understanding and advancing the fundamental knowledge through systematic variations of components and interrogating the performance limiting parameters. He played the lead role in setting up India’s first truly indigenous DSC module fabrication line for IPV partnering with industry and was licensed for commercialization in 2019. He is a recipient of CSIR Young Scientist Award (2020), INSA Medal for Young Scientist (2020), Best Emerging Young Scientist Award (2019), BRICS Young Scientist Award (2017), International Strategic Cooperation Award (2015).