Speakers

Stefano Amaducci

A full professor at the Department of Sustainable Crop Production at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Stefano Amaducci holds a degree in Agricultural Science from the University of Bologna, where he also obtained his PhD in field crops.
He coordinates the Field Crops Group, which aims to develop and promote sustainable solutions for healthy agro-ecosystems. He is president of Citimap Scarl, a company that specializes in remote sensing and precision agriculture and he Chairs the Federcanapa scientific committee. Amaducci is involved in numerous national and international sustainable agriculture and bio-economics-related research projects.  His own research work centers mostly on agronomic management and the ecophysiology of agricultural crops, as well as agrivoltaic research.  Thanks to experiments financed by RemTec and Enel Green Power, he and his research group have developed a calculation platform to simulate production in agrivoltaic environments, thus aiding the development of sustainable agrivoltaic systems. He his involved in national working groups aiming at optimising the development of agrivoltaics in Italy. In 2022, he chaired the international conference “Agrivoltaics 2022” hosted at Università Cattolica in Piacenza.
 

Natalie Banerji

Natalie Banerji is currently a Full Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Bern. Her research interests include the study of organic and hybrid materials using ultrafast spectroscopic techniques, in view of solar cell and bioelectronic applications. She studied Chemistry at the University of Geneva and obtained her Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry in 2009, under the supervision of Prof. Eric Vauthey. She then moved to the University of California in Santa Barbara (USA), to work on organic solar cells during a post-doctoral stay with Nobel Laureate Prof. Alan J. Heeger (2009-2011). In 2011, she was given the opportunity to start her independent research career in Switzerland at the Ecole Polytechnique Férérale de Lausanne (EPFL) with an Ambizione Fellowship by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). She obtained an SNSF-Professorship at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) in 2014, and was subsequently nominated tenured Associate Professor in 2015. She was President of the Chemistry Department in Fribourg form 2016-2017 and moved to Bern in 2017. In 2015, she obtained the Grammaticakis-Neumann Prize (Swiss Chemical Society) and in 2016, she was awarded an ERC Starting Grant. She is currently also part of the Swiss Research Council and Associate Editor of ACS Materials Letters.
 

Paul Blom

Paul W.M. Blom, born in 1965 in The Netherlands, received his Ph. D. Degree in 1992 from the Technical University Eindhoven on picosecond charge carrier dynamics in GaAs. At Philips Research Laboratories he was engaged in the electro-optical properties of polymer light-emitting diodes. From 2000 he held a professorship at the University of Groningen in the field of electrical and optical properties of organic semiconducting devices. In September 2008 he became Scientific Director of the Holst Centre in Eindhoven, where the focus is on foil-based electronics, followed in 2012 by an appointment as director at the MPI for polymer research in the field of molecular electronics. He is named among the World's Most Influential Minds and the Top 1% Highly Cited Researchers in Materials Science by Thomson Reuters.  
 

Christoph Brabec

Christoph J. Brabec received his PhD (1995) in Physical Chemistry from Linz University, Austria and joined the group of Alan Heeger at UC Santa Barbara (USA) for a sabbatical. He joined the SIEMENS research labs (project leader) in 2001, Konarka in 2004 (CTO), Erlangen University (FAU - Professor for Material Science) in 2009, ZAE Bayern e.V. (scientific director and board member) in 2010, spokesmen of the Interdisciplinary Center for Nanostructured Films (IZNF) in 2013 and became director at FZ Jülich (IEK-11) in 2018. In 2018 he was further appointed as Honorary Professor at the University of Groningen, Netherlands.
His research interests include all aspects of solution processing organic, hybrid and inorganics semiconductor devices with a strong focus on photovoltaics and renewable energy systems. His combined scientific and technological interests supported the spin-out of several companies. He published over 1000 articles, thereof about 750 peer reviewed articles, about 100 patents, several books and book chapters and overall received more than 95000 citations. His h-index is over 130 and Thompson Reuters HRC lists him for the last years consecutively as a highly cited researcher.

David Cahen

David Cahen was born and raised in the Netherlands. After finishing school he moved to Israel. He studied chemistry & physics at the Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem (HUJI; B.Sc.), materials research at Northwestern & Stanford Univ. (Ph.D.), and, as PD, biophysics (of photosynthesis) at the HUJI and the Weizmann Inst. of Science (WIS). As WIS faculty he focusses on opto(bio)electronic materials chemistry & physics, emphasizing what can make such materials sustainable, which lead to his interest in self-healing of PV materials, and, quite distinctly, proteins as (opto)electronic materials. Presently AVS, MRS and Helmholtz Int’l fellow and visiting prof at Chiba Univ., he is also active in energy & sustainability research (founder and 1stdirector of WIS’ concerted effort in the field) and education (organizes and teaches local and int’l courses), and in science for peace efforts. From 2017-2022 he headed a group at near-by Bar-Ilan Univ.

Marika Edoff

Marika Edoff received her MSc in Electric and Electronic Engineering in 1990 and PhD degree in Solid State Electronics in 1997 from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. She joined Uppsala University in 1997 and was promoted to full professor in Solid State Electronics with specialization in solar cells in 2012 at Uppsala University. Her main interest is in chalcogenide based thin film solar cells, especially Cu(In,Ga)Se2 (CIGS) and its alloys, where she has pioneered research on alkali elements in this type of solar cells as well as passivated back contacts with applications for ultrathin CIGS-based solar cells. She was one of four founders of the spin-off company Solibro AB. In 2003 she became group leader for the thin film solar cell research at Uppsala University and founded the Division of Solar Cell Technology in 2020. She is member of the board of the Swedish Research Council and has received the Gustav Adolf medal in gold and the Björkénska Prize for her contributions to leadership and research at Uppsala University.
 

Richard Friend

Professor Sir Richard Friend is at the Department 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.   These have been developed and exploited through a number of spin-off companies.  His current research interests are directed to novel schemes that seek to improve the performance and cost of solar cells. 

Professor Friend is a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and a Foreign Member of the US National Academy of Engineering.  He has received many international awards for his research, including Laureate of the Millennium Prize for Technology (2010) the Harvey Prize (2011) of the Israel Institute of Technology and the von Hippel Award of the Materials Research Society (2015).  He was knighted for "Services to Physics" in the Queen's Birthday Honours List, 2003.
 

Feng Gao

Feng Gao is a professor at Linköping University. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 2011. He received prestigious career grants and awards from the European Research Council (StG 2016 and CoG 2021), the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (Tage Erlander Prize in Physics 2020), the Wallenberg Foundation, and Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research SSF (SSF Future Research Leader 2020). His group currently focuses on research into solution-processed energy materials and devices, mainly based on organic semiconductors and metal halide perovskites.
 

Michael Graetzel

Michael Graetzel is a Professor at EPFL where he develops photosystems for the generation of electricity and chemical fuels from sunlight. Michael graduated from the Technical University Berlin and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Notre Dame before joining the EPFL faculty as a professor of physical chemistry. There, he started his ground breaking investigations on colloidal semiconductors, which generated several new research fronts worldwide. Michael is well known for his discovery of mesoscopic dye sensitized solar cells, which in turn prompted the rise of perovskite solar cells, triggering a second revolution in photovoltaics. Michael’s pioneering work was recognized by a number of awards including the Rank Prize, BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Science, Millenium Technology Prize, Global Energy Prize, Marcel Benoist Prize, Balzan Prize, Harvey Prize and the Calveras Award for Leapfrog Photovoltaics. He is a member of several learned societies and received 12 honorary doctor degrees from European and Asian Universities. His over 1800 publications had a major impact on the photovoltaic field. A recent bibliometric ranking by Stanford University places Michael first amongst 100’000 world-wide leading scientists across all areas of science. According to the Web of Science (2022), he is currently the most highly cited chemist in the world.
 

Martin Green

Martin Green was born in Brisbane, Australia and educated at the University of Queensland and McMaster University, Canada. After completing his PhD at McMaster, he joined the University of New South Wales, Sydney where he is now a Scientia Professor and the Founding Director of the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics, involving five other Australian Universities and research groups. His group’s contributions to photovoltaics include conception and development of the “PERC” solar cell, now accounting for about 90% of global production, and holding the record for silicon solar cell energy conversion efficiency for 30 of the last 40 years, regarded as a “Top Ten” milestone in solar photovoltaics history since Becquerel’s initial studies in 1839. Major international awards include the 1999 Australia Prize, the 2021 Japan Prize, the 2022 Millennium Technology Prize presented in Helsinki and the 2023 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (with three of his former students).​​​​
 

Jianhui Hou

Jianhui Hou, PhD, Professor, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ICCAS). In 2006, he got his PhD degree at ICCAS; during 2006-2008, worked at UCLA as the postdoctoral researcher; during 2008-2010, served as the Director of Research at Solarmer Energy Inc. At the end of 2010, he joined ICCAS and built a research team. Dr. Hou focuses on the research of organic photovoltaics, and three of his major interests includes: (a) to design and synthesize new conjugated polymers and small molecules for the applications in efficient organic photovoltaic cells; (b) to improve photovoltaic performance of organic photovoltaic cells by device engineering; (c) to develop fabrication process of large area and flexible organic photovoltaic cells.
Dr. Hou has co-authored 400+ papers in the peer-reviewed journals with a H-index of 123 and published 20+ patents. Now, he also serves as the associate editor of Chinese Journal of Chemistry and the editorial board member of a few peer-reviewed journals. For more information, please visit the websites of  http://houjianhui.iccas.ac.cn/ and https://www.webofscience.com/wos/author/record/E-5824-2011
 

Olle Inganäs

Olle Inganäs is emeritus professor of biomolecular and organic electronics, IFM, Linköpings Universitet, Sweden. He received a MSc in engineering physics from Chalmers University of Technology (1977), a BSc in philosophy and economics from Göteborg University (1978), and a PhD in applied physics at Linköping University in 1984.  He was appointed professor in 1999. He received the Göran Gustafsson prize in physics in 1997, and was appointed Wallenberg Scholar 2010-2020. He was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, class of physics, in 2006, a member of the Nobel committee for the prize in physics 2012-2016, and chairman in 2016.
 
Inganäs has focused on studies of the class of electronic polymers throughout areas of polymer physics, electrochemistry, electronics and optics. He has contributed to a number of startup companies in the field of electronic polymers. His current interest include energy conversion and energy storage with organic photovoltaic devices and organic supercabatteries, as well as the use of biopolymers as organisers of electronic polymers in biodetection. 
 

Rene Janssen

René Janssen is a university professor in at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the departments Chemical Engineering & Chemistry and Applied Physics, and further affiliated to the Dutch Institute for Fundamental Energy Research.

The research focuses on developing, understanding, and employing molecular and hybrid semiconductor materials for optoelectronic and energy applications. These activities combine the synthesis of materials, optical spectroscopy, electrochemistry, and structural investigations, with the design, fabrication, and characterization of devices. In recent years activities have been in the field of organic and perovskite solar cells, photodetectors, organic flow batteries, and solar fuels.
 

Prashant Kamat

Prashant V. Kamat is a Rev. John A. Zahm, C.S.C., Professor of Science in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Radiation Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame. He is also a Concurrent Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Professor Kamat has for more than three decades worked to build bridges between physical chemistry and material science to develop advanced nanomaterials that promise cleaner and more efficient light energy conversion. He has published more than 500 scientific papers that have been well recognized by the scientific community . Thomson-Reuters has featured him as one of the most cited researchers each year since 2014 (2014 -2020). He is a Fellow of ACS, ECS and AAAS. He is also Pravasi Fellow of the Indian Nationalal Science Academy. He is currently serving as the Editor-in-Chief of ACS Energy Letters. (URL:Kamatlab.com)Prashant Kamat

David Mitzi

David Mitzi is the Simon Family Distinguished Professor at Duke University, with appointments to the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Chemistry. He received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Engineering Physics from Princeton University (1985) and his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University (1990). Prior to joining the faculty at Duke (2014), Dr. Mitzi spent 23 years at IBM’s Watson Research Center, where his focus was on the search for and application of new electronic materials, including organic-inorganic perovskites and inorganic materials for photovoltaic, LED, transistor and memory applications. He also served as manager for the Photovoltaic Science and Technology Department, where he initiated/managed a multi-company program to develop a low-cost, high-throughput approach to deposit thin-film chalcogenide-based absorbers for high-efficiency photovoltaics. Dr. Mitzi is a fellow of the Materials Research Society (MRS) and received the 2020 American Chemical Society (ACS) Award in the Chemistry of Materials for pioneering work on halide perovskites.  
 

Laura Miranda Perez

Dr. Laura Miranda is passionate about innovation, technology and sustainability. She has more than 10 years’ experience in the solar sector and over 20 years in R&D and innovation. Beginning her career at Oxford PV as a scientist, she was rapidly promoted to Head of Materials before transitioning to the role of Corporate ESG and IP Manager.
As Head of Materials, Laura was responsible for external projects and materials technology transfer. More recently, her work has focused on product eco-design, implementing sustainable practises to minimise environmental impact, and engagement with external associations for advocacy activities, being regularly involved in policy and compliance. She has also managed strategic IP since 2020.
Convinced that innovation is a necessity to meet current global and ever-changing demands, she believes that the key to success for any business lies in the HOW, and is now her purpose and direction. A PhD graduate in Materials science with a BSc in Chemistry, Laura obtained two consecutive fellowships, College du France (Paris) and University of Oxford (Materials Department) before moving to industrial research. Laura has a clear track record with over 2600 citations and 60 patents, numerous publications and, a regular guest speaker at international panels and conferences.

 

Tsutomu Miyasaka

Tsutomu Miyasaka received his PhD from The University of Tokyo in 1981. In 2001, after 20 year R&D work at Fuji Photo Film, Co., he moved to Toin University of Yokohama (TUY) as a professor in Graduate School of Engineering. In 2004 he has established a TUY-based startup, Peccell Technologies. Having served as a visiting professor at The University of Tokyo (2005 to 2010), he is currently a fellow of its Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology and working as a project professor at TUY. His research has been focused on photovoltaic (PV) energy conversion involving photoelectrochemical processes and the research of dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC). Since the discovery of the organic inorganic hybrid perovskite as PV materials in 2006, his research has been focused on the halide perovskite-based solar cells. He was awarded a Ministry of Science & Education prize in 2009 for his DSSC research. For the perovskite photovoltaics, he was selected as Clarivate Analytics Citation Laureate in 2017 and awarded Rank Prize in 2022. He has been leading state projects funded from Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) and conducting a space application project with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

 

Jenny Nelson

Jenny Nelson is a Royal Society Research Professor based in the Physics department at Imperial College London, where she researches novel materials for solar energy conversion. Her current research is focussed on understanding structure-property relationships in molecular and hybrid semiconductor materials and how these relationships influence the mechanisms of solar energy conversion. This work combines basic experimental (electrical, spectroscopic and structural) measurements with simulation of materials and devices, with the aim of optimising the performance of solar cells and other devices. She also works with the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial to explore the mitigation potential of renewable energy technologies. She is an ISI Highly Cited Researcher and has published over 300 articles, several book chapters and a book on the physics of solar cells. She holds several awards including the 2016 Institute of Physics Faraday medal and was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2014. 
 

Thuc-Quyen Nguyen

Thuc-Quyen Nguyen is the Director of the Center for Polymers and Organic Solids and professor in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests are doping and charge transport in organic semiconductors, bioelectronics, and device physics of organic solar cells, ratchets, transistors, and photodetectors.
She is co-authored 290 publications and 3 book chapters that received over 34,500 citations (H-index: 94). Recognition for her research includes 2005 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, 2006 National Science Foundation CAREER Award, 2008 Camille Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award, 2009 Alfred Sloan Research Fellows, 2010 National Science Foundation American Competitiveness and Innovation Fellows, 2015 Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Award, 2016 Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, 2019 Hall of Fame - Advanced Materials, 2019 Beaufort Visiting Scholar, St John’s College, Cambridge University, 2015-2019 World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds; Top 1% Highly Cited Researchers in Materials Science by Thomson Reuters and Clarivate Analytics, 2019 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 2021 & 2022 Women in Materials Science by Advanced Materials, 2022 Wilhelm Exner Medal, and 2023 Elected Member of the National Academy of Engineering.
 

Nam-Gyu Park

Nam-Gyu Park is Distinguished professor of School of Chemical Engineering and Director of SKKU Institute of Energy Science and Technology (SIEST), Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU), Suwon, Republic of Korea.

He received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Seoul National University in 1988, 1992 and 1995, respectively. 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 was director of solar cell research center at Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) before joining SKKU as a full professor in 2009. He is a fellow of Korean Academy of Science and Technology (KAST) since 2017.

He has been working on high efficiency mesoscopic nanostructured solar cells since 1997. Prof. Park was the first to report a stable perovskite solar cell in 2012. He received Citation Laureate (top 0.01% scientist) on September 20, 2017 by Clarivate Analytics for his contribution to perovskite photovoltaics.

He received many awards, and his most prestigious awards were Ho-Am Prize (Samsung, 2018) and Rank Prize (Rank Prize Foundation, UK, 2022). Prof. Park has currently more than 370 refereed publications and more than 70 patents. He received H-index of 110 from google scholar as of March 2023. He is currently Senior Editor of ACS Energy Letters.
 

Tönu Pullerits 

Tõnu Pullerits obtained his PhD from the Institute of Physics at Tartu University, Estonia, in 1991. He pursued his postdoc work in Free University of Amsterdam (1992–1993), Umeå University (1993–1994). He moved to Lund University 1994 where he is currently full professor and head of the Division of Chemical Physics. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences since 2016. His research interests include energy transport in molecular systems, ultrafast charge carrier dynamics and photophysics in photovoltaic materials, and coherent multidimensional spectroscopy.

Michael Saliba

Prof. Michael Saliba is a full professor and the director of the Institute for Photovoltaics (ipv) at the University of Stuttgart, with a dual appointment at the Research Center Jülich, Germany. His research focuses on a deeper understanding and improvement of optoelectronic properties of photovoltaic materials with an emphasis on emerging perovskites for a sustainable energy future. Since 2021, Michael is the Speaker of the DFG Graduate School (GRK) 2642 for “Quantum Engineering”. In 2022, he was awarded an Starting Grant by the European Research Council (ERC).
Previously, Michael was at TU Darmstadt, Fribourg University and a Marie Curie Fellow at EPFL, Switzerland with research stays at Cornell and Stanford. He obtained his PhD at Oxford University and MSc degree at Stuttgart University together with the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research.
Michael has published numerous works in the fields of plasmonics, lasers, LEDs and perovskite optoelectronics. He is listed as ISI Highly Cited Researcher since 2018. He was awarded the Heinz-Maier-Leibnitz prize by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and named as one of the World’s 35 Innovators Under 35 by the MIT Technology Review.
 

Edward Sargent

Prof. Edward (Ted) H. Sargent is the Lynn Hopton Davis and Greg Davis Professor at Northwestern University, where he holds appointments in the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Previously he was University Professor at the University of Toronto, where he held the Canada Research Chair in Nanotechnology. In administration, he served as Vice President – Research for the University of Toronto. His publications have been cited 120,000 times and 170 of his works have been cited 170 times or more. He founded and served as CTO of InVisage, acquired by Apple in 2017. https://light.northwestern.edu

 

Susanne Sibentritt

Susanne Siebentritt is a physics professor and heads the laboratory for photovoltaics at the University of Luxembourg, which she established in 2007.
Her research interest is twofold: the electronic structure of semiconductors and thin film solar cells and the fundamental analysis of loss mechanisms in these devices.
She studied physics at the University of Erlangen and received her doctoral degree from the University of Hannover. After several postdoc positions at the University of California in Los Angeles, the Free University of Berlin and the Hahn-Meitner-Institute (now Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin), she led a group at Hahn-Meitner-Institute for nearly 10 years, which focused on the physics of chalcopyrite solar cells.
In 2014 she received the FNR Outstanding Publication Award together with three co-authors. In 2015 she was awarded the "Grand Prix en Sciences Physique – Prix Paul Wurth" of the Luxembourgish Institut Grand Ducal. She is a board member of research programmes for the energy transition by the German and by the Luxembourgish government. She serves on the editorial board of Physical Review Applied and of Solar RRL. In 2022 she received the FNR Outstanding Mentor Award. In 2023 she was awarded an honorable doctorate from the University of Uppsala.
 

Richard Swanson

Richard Swanson received his PhD from Stanford University in 1974. After completing his PhD, he joined the Electrical Engineering faculty at Stanford. His research investigated the semiconductor properties of silicon relevant for better understanding the operation of silicon solar cells. These studies have helped pave the way for steady improvement in silicon solar cell performance.

In 1991 Dr. Swanson resigned from his faculty position to devote full time to SunPower Corporation, a company he founded. Today, SunPower produces the highest performance photovoltaic panels available.

Dr. Swanson has received widespread recognition for his work. In 2002, he was awarded the William R. Cherry award by the IEEE for outstanding contributions to the photovoltaic field, and in 2006 the Becquerel Prize in Photovoltaics from the European Communities. He was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 2008 and a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2009. He received the 2009 Economist Magazine Energy Innovator Award. In 2010 he was awarded the IEEE Jin-ichi Nishizawa Medal for the conception and commercialization of high-efficiency point-contact solar cell technology, and in 2011 the Karl Boer Solar Energy Medal of Merit Award.
 

Magnus T Borgström

Magnus T. Borgström was born in Perstorp, Sweden, in 1974. He received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in physics from Lund University, Lund, Sweden, in 1999 and 2003, respectively. After completing the degree in 2003, for one year he was a Postdoctor at ETH-Zurich, Switzerland, where he was engaged in working on optical properties of semiconductor nanowires before joining Philips Research, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, in 2005, as Marie Curie Post- doctoral Fellow, where he was engaged in working on epitaxial growth and characterization of semiconductor nanowires. Then he moved to Sweden and Lund University in 2007. Since 2016, he is full professor being involved in semiconductor epitaxy, with the current main focus on nanowire growth and electro-optical studies of materials with promise for energy saving and harvesting applications. He is currently the deputy coordinator of the Semiconductor technology area of NanoLund.

Eva Unger

Eva Unger is currently an active researcher in both Sweden and Germany.

After graduating with a Diploma in Chemistry from the University of Marburg in 2007, Eva Unger carried out her Ph.D. research work under the supervision of Anders Hagfeldt and Gerrit Boschloo at Uppsala University, Sweden, graduating in 2012. Funded by a fellowship from the Swedish Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation, she then carried out postdoctoral research at Stanford University, supervised by Prof. Michael McGehee, from 2012-2014 where she started working on halide perovskite solar cells.

Her scientific background is mostly in hybrid optoelectronic devices and her research team focuses on utilizing scalable solution-based deposition methods for the manufacturing of optoelectronic device prototypes. Her research group has a strong interest in the investigation and unravelling of dynamic processes in solar cell fabrication and operation.

Since 2016, Eva Unger worked between Lund University, Sweden, where she currently holds a Senior Lecturer position, and at the Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin, where she is headed a research group initiated by the BMBF-Young Investigator Program. Since 2022, she is also an appointed Professor at Humboldt University Berlin enabled through the Helmholtz program for first-time appointments of excellent female scientists.

 

Henry Snaith

Henry Snaith is the Binks Professor of Renewable Energy in the Physics Department of the University of Oxford and works on new materials and devices for photovoltaic solar energy conversion. His multidisciplinary work spans activities from new materials discovery and synthesis, through device optimization to fundamental spectroscopic and theoretical investigations. He discovered that metal halide perovskites can produce extremely efficient solar cells when integrated into a simple thin-film device, which are also very easy and cheap to manufacture. By combining perovskites with silicon, in so-called “tandem cells” he has demonstrated efficiencies far beyond what is possible with existing commercial PV technologies and promises to deliver the next generation of improved PV for powering the world towards net zero. Alongside his academic work, Henry is intimately involved in the commercialization of this technology, as co-founder and Chief Scientific Offer of Oxford PV. Oxford PV is presently building the first full-scale production line based on his perovskite technology. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of 37, for starting a new field of research attracting both academic and industrial following. He has also won numerous awards and accolades, including the Becquerel Prize in Photovoltaics, the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientist, being named one of “Natures Ten” people who mattered in 2013, by the international journal Nature, and he topped the rank of the world’s most influential scientific minds from 2015 to 2017, as judged by Thomson Reuters and Clarivate Analytical.