Invited Speakers

Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin

Antonio Abate is the director of the “Novel Materials and Interfaces for Photovoltaic Solar Cells” department at the Helmholtz-Centrum Berlin in Germany. He is researching solar energy conversion with halide perovskites.
Before his current position, Antonio led solar cell research at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland as a team leader. He was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne within the group of Prof. Grätzel.  He worked for four years as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Prof. Snaith and at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Prof. Steiner.  Antonio graduated summa cum laude from the University of Naples Federico II in 2006. He got his PhD summa cum laude at Politecnico di Milano in 2011.

University of Rome Tor Vergata

Princeton University

Quinn Burlingame obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2018, following a Master's and Bachelor's in Electrical Engineering from The Pennsylvania State University. He is currently the Academic Research Manager in Prof. Lynn Loo's Research Group at Princeton University, where he has been a member since 2019. His research primarily focuses on designing stable and efficient organic and perovskite photovoltaics for building-integrated applications and developing accelerated aging techniques for perovskite cells with lifetimes exceeding 30 years. Additionally, since June 2022, he is Scientific Advisor for Andluca Technologies, contributing to the development of transparent organic solar cells and luminescent concentrators for smart window applications. He is the first or corresponding author of 15 publications and holds 7 patents and disclosures. His contributions to the field have been recognized with multiple awards, including the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Postdoctoral Fellowship and the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation's Travel Grant.

Chulalongkorn University

National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Joseph Berry (@joe_jberry) is a senior research fellow at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory working on halide perovskite solar cells. His PhD for work was on spin transport and physics in semiconductor heterostructures from Penn State University.  His efforts at NREL emphasize relating basic interfacial properties to technologically relevant device level behaviors in traditional and novel semiconductor heterostructures including oxides, organics and most recently hybrid semiconducting materials. He leads the US Department of Energy (DOE) Solar Energy Technology Office’s SETO core technology program related to metal halide perovskite photovoltaics at NREL. He is also a member of the University of Colorado Boulder Physics Department working on basic aspects of organic-inorganic hybrid material and semiconductors as principle investigator on the NREL lead Department of Energy, Center for Hybrid Organic Inorganic Semiconductors for Energy (CHOISE) Energy Frontier Research Center.

 King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)

University of Hong Kong

Aleksandra B. Djurišić obtained Ph. D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the School of Electrical Engineering, the University of Belgrade in 1997. She joined the Dept. of Physics at the University of Hong Kong in 2003. Her research interests include nano-, perovskite, and organic materials, and their various applications.

Southern Denmark University

Vida Engmann obtained her Dr. rer. nat. in 2014 from Ilmenau University of Technology, Germany. In 2014 she joined the University of Southern Denmark, where she was in 2020 appointed associate professor. Her research focuses on bioinspired approaches to the stabilization of organic semiconductor thin films and energy devices. For her work on additive-assisted stabilization, she received 2019 L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science award, and 2020 International Rising Talent award. In 2020 she was awarded Carlsberg Young Researcher Fellowship, and in 2021 Independent Research Fund Denmark Sapere Aude grant. She is a member of SDU Committee on diversity and equality, and editorial board member of IOP Journal of Physics: Materials.

University of Michigan

Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology

Monica Lira-Cantu is a Full Professor and Group Leader of the Nanostructured Materials for Photovoltaic Energy Group at the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2) in Barcelona, Spain. Her research interests are the synthesis and application of nanostructured materials for emerging solar cells like dye-sensitized, hybrid, organic and perovskite solar cells and the integration of different types of energy technologies for self-power electronics and the production of green energy. She has more than 135 publications, including 125 published articles in scientific journals, one book, 10 book chapters, and 11 patents. She is a reviewer for more than 30 scientific organizations and more than 50 scientific journals. She worked as a staff chemist for ExxonMobil Research & Engineering (USA), a visiting professor at EPFL (Switzerland) and has been visiting scientist at the Center for Advanced Science and Innovation (Japan), Oslo University (Norway), and the Risø DTU National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy (Denmark). Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) and the Cannon Foundation in Europe. She is currently Editor-in-Chief of APL Energy (AIP Publishing) and Advisory Editorial Board for Discovery Materials and Springer Nature Applied Sciences (Nature); Adv. Energy and Sustainability (Wiley); Chemical Physics Impact (Elsevier) and Matter (Cell Press).

Suzhou Institute of Nano-Tech and Nano-Bionics (SINANO)

Dr. Chang-Qi Ma received his PhD degree at the Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2003. After that he was a postdoctoral research assistant at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK, until he joined the research group of Professor Peter Bäuerle at the University of Ulm in 2004 as a Humboldt research fellow. From January 2007 till May 2011, he did his Habilitation in Institute of Organic Chemistry II and Advanced Materials, Ulm University. Since June 2011 he joined Suzhou Institute of Nano-Tech and Nano-Bionics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, as a professor of chemistry. His research group mainly works on printed organic/perovskite solar cells and precision printing processes for electronics. He has published over 180 papers and filed over 30 patents.

University of Colorado Boulder 

Mike 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 is a cofounder and the Chief Scientist of Tynt Technologies, a company that is commercializing dynamic windows based on reversible metal electrodeposition. He is an advisor to Swift Solar, which was cofounded by former members of his research group.  He was a professor in the Materials Science and Engineering Department at Stanford University for 18 years.  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.

CEA

Muriel Matheron obtained her PhD in Material Science from the Ecole Polytechnique in 2005. She also graduated in 2001 from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Techniques Avancées (engineering school). She is currently Research Director at CEA, where she conducts research on sustainable synthesis of fuels and chemicals by thermal and photoelectrochemical routes. In the past 10 years, her research has focused on the development of encapsulation systems and characterization tools to improve solar cells efficiency and stability (be it organic, perovskite and silicon / perovskite photovoltaics). She was also involved in research dedicated to direct solar water splitting building integrated photoelectrochemical cells. She is co-author of over 25 papers in international scientific journals and proceedings, and holds 16 patents.

Imperial College

Brown University

Nitin Padture is the Otis E. Randall University Professor in the School of Engineering, and founding Director of the Initiative for Sustainable Energy, at Brown University in the USA. A materials scientist by training, Padture's research interests are in the broad areas of advanced ceramics and nanomaterials, for applications ranging from solar photovoltaics to jet engines for renewable energy and energy efficiency. He has authored some 300 publications, including 10 patents. Padture is an elected Fellow of the American Ceramic Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Materials Research Society. He is Editor of the journals Acta Materialia and Scripta Materialia, and he serves on the Editorial Boards of the journals ACS Energy Letters and EcoMat.   

National Renewable Energy Laboratory

University of Tokyo

Satoshi Uchida (born 1965) is now a professor of Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST), The University of Tokyo, Japan. He obtained his Ph.D. at Graduate School of Engineering, Applied Chemistry, Tohoku University in 1995 and was a Research Associate from 1991 to 1996. During the period he belonged Research Institute of Mineral Dressing and Metallurgy (SENKEN), Institute for Advanced Materials Processing (IAMP), Institute for Chemical Reaction Science (ICRS) and Institute of Multidisciplinary Research for Advanced Materials (IMRAM) at Tohoku University. After that he moved to the current institute (RCAST) of The University of Tokyo and became a Research Professor since May 2017.

Zurich University of Applied Science (ZHAW)

Wolfgang Tress is currently a professor at Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) leading the ERC-funded novel semiconductor devices group. His interests include characterizing and modeling of novel semiconductor materials and photovoltaic devices. Recently, he has been working on the device physics and the mixed ionic–electronic conductivity of perovskites. Prior to his appointment at ZHAW, he was an Ambizione fellow at the Graetzel and Hagfeldt labs at EPFL and a Marie Curie fellow at LMU. Based on his Ph.D. thesis at TU Dresden and postdoctoral research in the Inganäs group, he published a monograph on organic solar cells. For his influential works on luminescence, hysteresis, and stability in perovskite solar cells he received various awards such as the Energy & Environmental Science Readers' Choice Lectureship.

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Iris Visoly-Fisher completed her Ph.D. in Materials and Interfaces at the Weizmann Inst. of Science in 2004, studying single grain boundaries in polycrystalline CdTe solar cells. She then moved to Arizona State University as a postdoctoral fellow, where she worked on electrochemical potential-dependent current transport in single biomolecules. In 2008 she joined Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She has published over 60 scientific publications, and guided more than 35 graduate students and postdocs. Her research interests include materials for renewable energy production and storage, photovoltaics, optoelectronics and organic electronics; surface science; and characterization through a ‘bottom up’ approach – from the properties of a single building block to understanding the system’s behavior. She specializes in accelerated stability testing using concentrated natural sunlight and outdoor operational lilfetime characterization. Her studies elucidated the photo-degradation mechanisms active in organic and perovskite photovoltaic materials, and suggested methodologies to improve their stability. In parallel, she studies photoelectrodes for fuel production using renewable solar energy.

Swansea University