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.

Philippe Guyot-Sionnest is a professor of Physics and Chemistry at the University of Chicago since 1991.  His group developed original aspects of colloidal quantum dots and nanoparticles, including single dot PL microscopy, the luminescent core/shell CdSe/Zns, intraband spectroscopy, charge transfer doping, electrochemical and conductivity studies, the "solid state ligand exchange", and mid-infrared quantum dots.   Prior work includes the development of surface infrared-visible sum-frequency generation and the early applications to interfacial and time resolved vibrational spectroscopy of adsorbates.  

Taeghwan Hyeon received his B. S. (1987) and M. S. (1989) in Chemistry from Seoul National University (SNU), Korea. He obtained his Ph.D. in Chemistry from U. Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1996), and conducted one-year postdoctoral research at the Catalysis Center of Northwestern University. Since he joined the faculty of the School of Chemical and Biological Engineering of Seoul National University in 1997, he has focused on the synthesis and applications of uniform-sized nanoparticles and related nanostructured materials, and published > 400 papers in prominent international journals (> 58,000 citations and h-index of > 124). He is a SNU Distinguished Professor. In September 2020, he was selected as 2020 Citation Laureate (known as Nobel Prize watch list) in Chemistry by Clarivate Analytics/Web of Science. In 2011, he was selected as “Top 100 Chemists” of the decade by UNESCO&IUPAC. Since 2014, he has been chosen as “Highly Cited Researcher” in Chemistry and Materials Science areas by Clarivate Analytics. Since 2012, he has been serving as a Director of Center for Nanoparticle Research of Institute for Basic Science (IBS). He is Fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) and Materials Research Society (MRS). He received many awards including the Korea S&T Award from the Korean President (2016), Hoam Prize (2012, Samsung Hoam Foundation), POSCO-T. J. Park Award (2008), and the IUVSTA Prize for Technology (International Union for Vacuum Science, Technique and Applications, 2016). Since 2010, he has served as an Associate Editor of Journal of the American Chemical Society. He has been serving as editorial (advisory) board members of ACS Central Science, Advanced Materials, Nano Today, and Small.

 

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

Victor I. Klimov is a Fellow of Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Director of the Center for Advanced Solar Photophysics of the U.S. Department of Energy. He received his M.S. (1978), Ph.D. (1981), and D.Sc. (1993) degrees from Moscow State University. He is a Fellow of both the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America, and a recipient of the Humboldt Research Award. His research interests include optical spectroscopy of semiconductor and metal nanostructures, carrier relaxation processes, strongly confined multiexcitons, energy and charge transfer, and fundamental aspects of photovoltaics.

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.

Vanmaekelbergh's research started in the field of semiconductor electrochemistry in the 1980s; this later evolved into the electrochemical fabrication of macroporous semiconductors as the strongest light scatterers for visible light, and the study of electron transport in disordered (particulate) semiconductors. In the last decade, Vanmaekelbergh's interest shifted to the field of nanoscience: the synthesis of colloidal semiconductor quantum dots and self-assembled quantum-dot solids, the study of their opto-electronic properties with optical spectroscopy and UHV cryogenic Scanning Tunneling Microscopy and Spectroscopy, and electron transport in electrochemically-gated quantum-dot solids. Scanning tunnelling spectroscopy is also used to study the electronic states in graphene quantum dots. More recently, the focus of the research has shifted to 2-D nano structured semiconductors, e.g. honeycomb semiconductors with Dirac-type electronic bands.

Emily Weiss is an Associate Professor and the Irving M. Klotz Research Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Northwesern University. Emily earned her PhD from Northwestern in 2005, advised by Mark Ratner and Michael Wasielewski. Her graduate work focused on magnetic superexchange interactions of radical ion pairs created by electron transfer within organic donor-acceptor systems. Emily did postdoctoral research at Harvard under George M. Whitesides from 2005-2008 as a Petroleum Research Fund Postdoctoral Energy Fellow, and started her independent career at Northwestern in Fall 2008. Emily’s group studies electronic processes at organic-inorganic interfaces within colloidal and semiconductor and metal nanoparticles. The objectives of this research are to understand the mechanisms of conversion of energy from one class to another (light, heat, chemical potential, electrical potential) at interfaces, to understand the behavior of quantum confined systems far from equilibrium, and to design and synthesize nanostructures that are new combinations of organic and inorganic components.

Vanessa Wood is a professor in the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at ETH Zurich, where she heads the Laboratory for Nanoelectronics. Before joining ETH in 2011, she was a postdoctoral associate in the laboratory of Professor Yet-Ming Chiang and Professor Craig Carter in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT, performing research on novel lithium-ion battery systems. She received her MSc and PhD from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. Her graduate work was done in the group of Professor Vladimir Bulović and focused on the development of optoelectronic devices containing colloidally synthesized quantum dots.