- Materials: Pb-free halide perovskites. Halide 3-dimensional, and low dimensional Perovskites. Quantum dots. Novel all inorganic halide perovskites. Novel charge (electron and hole) transporting materials. Recombination layers for tandem solar cells
- Properties and Modeling: Defects and defect passivation. Strain. Ferroelectricity. Relation between grain-size, boundaries and defect concentration. Interfacial engineering. Time-resolved spectroscopy. Theory/computation
- Devices:Tandem. Flexible. Modules. Semitransparent. Screen printed PSCs. Novel printing methods. Optoelectronic applications of halide perovskites beyond photovoltaics
- Stability: In monolithic and tandem devices. Stability of modules and flexible solar cells. Protocols for characterization of stability. Degradation mechanisms. Effect of light, moisture, temperature and atmosphere and combinations thereof
- Integration for novel applications: PSCs integrated with energy storage devices for novel applications (wearables, IoT, sensors).
Prof. Mónica Lira-Cantú is Group Leader of the Nanostructured Materials for Photovoltaic Energy Group at the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (www.icn.cat located in Barcelona (Spain). She obtained a Bachelor in Chemistry at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education, ITESM Mexico (1992), obtained a Master and PhD in Materials Science at the Materials Science Institute of Barcelona (ICMAB) & Autonoma University of Barcelona (1995/1997) and completed a postdoctoral work under a contract with the company Schneider Electric/ICMAB (1998). From 1999 to 2001 she worked as Senior Staff Chemist at ExxonMobil Research & Engineering (formerly Mobil Technology Co) in New Jersey (USA) initiating a laboratory on energy related applications (fuel cells and membranes). She moved back to ICMAB in Barcelona, Spain in 2002. She received different awards/fellowships as a visiting scientist to the following laboratories: University of Oslo, Norway (2003), Riso National Laboratory, Denmark (2004/2005) and the Center for Advanced Science and Innovation, Japan (2006). In parallel to her duties as Group Leader at ICN2 (Spain), she is currently visiting scientist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, CH). Her research interests are the synthesis and application of nanostructured materials for Next-generation solar cells: Dye sensitized, hybrid, organic, all-oxide and perovskite solar cells. Monica Lira-Cantu has more than 85 published papers, 8 patents and 10 book chapters and 1 edited book (in preparation).
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.
Sam Stranks is Professor of Energy Materials Optoelectronics in the Department of Chemical Engineering & Biotechnology and the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. He obtained his DPhil (PhD) from the University of Oxford in 2012. From 2012-2014, he was a Junior Research Fellow at Worcester College Oxford and from 2014-2016 a Marie Curie Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He established his research group in 2017, with a focus on the optical and electronic properties of emerging semiconductors for low-cost electronics applications.
Sam received the 2016 IUPAP Young Scientist in Semiconductor Physics Prize, the 2017 Early Career Prize from the European Physical Society, the 2018 Henry Moseley Award and Medal from the Institute of Physics, the 2019 Marlow Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry, the 2021 IEEE Stuart Wenham Award and the 2021 Philip Leverhulme Prize in Physics. Sam is also a co-founder of Swift Solar, a startup developing lightweight perovskite PV panels, and an Associate Editor at Science Advances.
Giulia is Associate Professor at Physical Chemistry Unit at University of Pavia, leading the PVsquared2 team, and running the European Grant ERCStG Project “HYNANO”aiming at the development of advanced hybrid perovskites materials and innovative functional interfaces for efficient, cheap and stable photovoltaics. Within this field, Giulia contributed to reveal the fundamental lightinduced dynamical processes underlying the operation of such advanced optoelectronic devices whose understanding is paramount for a smart device development and for contributing to the transition of a green economy.
Giulia received an MS in Physical Engineering in 2008 and obtained her PhD in Physics cum laude in 2012 at the Politecnico of Milan. Her experimental thesis focused on the realisation of a new femtosecond-microscope for mapping the ultrafast phenomena at organic interfaces. During her PhD, she worked for one year at the Physics Department of Oxford University where she pioneered new concepts within polymer/oxide solar cell technology. From 2012-2015, she was a post-doctoral researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology in Milan. In 2015, she joined the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) with a Co-Funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship. From 2016 to 2019, she has been awarded by the Swiss Ambizione Energy Grant providing a platform to lead her independent research group at EPFL focused on the developemnt of new generation hybrid perovskite solar cells.
She is author of 90 peer-reviewed scientific papers bringing her h-index to 44 (>13’000 citations), focused on developement and understanding of the interface physics which governs the operation of new generation solar cells.
Recently, she received the USERN prize in Physical Science, the Swiss Physical Society Award in 2018 for Young Researcher and the IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Optics. She is currently USERN Ambassador for Italy and board member of the Young Academy of Europe.
More can be found at https://pvsquared2.unipv.it.
Weblink: https://people.epfl.ch/giulia.grancini?lang=en
Anders Hagfeldt is Professor in Physical Chemistry at EPFL, Switzerland. He obtained his Ph.D. at Uppsala University in 1993 and was a post-doc with Prof. Michael Grätzel (1993-1994) at EPFL, Switzerland. His research focuses on the field of mesoporous dye-sensitized solar cells, specifically physical chemical characterization of mesoporous electrodes for different types of optoelectronic devices. He has published more than 370 scientific papers that have received over 35,000 citations (with an h-index of 90). He was ranked number 46 on a list of the top 100 material scientists of the past decade by Times Higher Education. In 2014, 2015 and 2016 he was on the list of Thomson Reuter’s Highly Cited Researchers. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences in Stockholm. He is a visiting professor at Uppsala University, Sweden and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Eugene A. Katz received his MSc degree (1982) in Semiconductor Materials Science and Ph. D. (1990) in solid state physics from the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys. In 1995, he joined the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and has been working in the Department for Solar Energy and Environmental Physics ever since (now as a full professor). His research interests include a wide range of photovoltaic materials and devices, such as organic and perovskite-based photovoltaics, concentrator solar cells operated at ultra-high solar concentration (up to 10,000 suns), etc. He has published more than 120 peer-reviewed papers on these topics. In 2018 Prof. Katz was awarded the IAAM Medal (by the International Association of Advanced Materials) for the outstanding research in the field of New Energy Materials & Technology.
Jovana V. Milíc has been an Associate Professor at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Turku in Finland since September 2024. She obtained her Dr. Sc. degree in the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, in 2017. She then worked as a Scientist in the Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces at EPFL and as an Assistant Professor at the Adolphe Merkle Institute of the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Her research is centered around bioinspired stimuli-responsive (supra)molecular materials for energy conversion, with a particular interest in photovoltaics and neuro-morphic computing for smart and sustainable (nano)technologies. For more information, refer to her website (www.jovanamilic.com).
Nam-Gyu Park is professor and SKKU-Fellow at School of Chemical Engineering and adjunct professor at Department of Energy Science, Sungkyunkwan University. He got Ph.D. in Inorganic Solid State Chemistry from Seoul National University in 1995. He worked at ICMCB-CNRS, France, from 1996 to 1997 and at National Renewable Energy Laboratory, USA, from 1997 to 1999 as postdoctoral researchers. He worked as Director of Solar Cell Research Center at Korea Institute of Science and Technology from 2005 to 2009 and as a principal scientist at Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute from 2000 to 2005 before joining Sungkyunkwan University in 2009. He has been doing researches on high efficiency mesoscopic solar cells including perovskite solar cell and dye-sensitized solar cell since 1997. He is pioneer in solid state perovskite solar cell, which was first developed in 2012. He received awards, including Scientist Award of the Month (MEST, Korea), KyungHyang Electricity and Energy Award (KEPCO, Korea), KIST Award of the Year (KIST, Korea) and Dupont Science and Technology Award (Dupont Korea), SKKU fellowship, and MRS Outstanding Research Award (MRS, Boston) and WCPEC Paper Award (Kyoto, Japan). He published over 230 scientific papers, including Science, Nature Materials, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Energy and Nature Communications, 80 patent applications and 8 book chapters. He received H-index of 67 as of May, 2017.
Dr. Yana Vaynzof is the Chair for Emerging Electronic Technologies at the Technical University of Dresden (Germany) and a Director at the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research Dresden. She received a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology (Israel) in 2006 and a M. Sc. In Electrical Engineering from Princeton University (USA) in 2008. In 2011, she received a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Cambridge (UK). Yana was a postdoctoral research associate at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge (UK) and an assistant professor at Heidelberg University (Germany) from 2014 to 2019. Yana Vaynzof is the recipient of a number of fellowships and awards, including the ERC Starting Grant, ERC Consolidator Grant, Gordon Wu Fellowship, Henry Kressel Fellowship, Fulbright-Cottrell Award and the Walter Kalkhof-Rose Memorial Prize. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and the winner of the Energy & Environmental Science Lectureship Award. Her research interests lie in the field of emerging photovoltaics, focusing on the study of material and device physics of organic, quantum dot and perovskite solar cells by integrating device fabrication and characterisation with the application and development of advanced spectroscopic methods.
Alison Walker's research is on multiscale modelling of materials and devices, focussing on organic and perovskite opto-electronic and electronic devices. She took her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at the University of Oxford, followed by postdocs at Michigan State University in the US and at Daresbury Laboratory in the UK. Then she took up a lectureship at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, moving to the University of Bath in 1998, holding a Royal Society Industry Fellowship with Cambridge Display Technology 2003-2006. She directs the Centre for Doctoral Training in New and Sustainable Photovoltaics involving 7 UK universities. She has coordinated four EU projects, including the Horizon 2020 Innovative Training Network, Maestro,MAking pErovskiteS TRuly explOitable, and was a partner in the Horizon2020 project EoCoE -II, Energy Oriented Centre of Excellence for Energy, towards exascale for energy. In 2019 she chaired the Solar Commission aimed at publicising the role of solar in the UK economy - see her website https://people.bath.ac.uk/pysabw/. She was a member of the physics assessment sub panel for assessing UK research in 2021.