Emerging inorganic materials in thin-film photovoltaics Faraday Discussion

David Mitzi is the Simon Family 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. 

Aron Walsh holds the Chair of Materials Design at Imperial College London. He was awarded his PhD in Chemistry from Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), completed a postdoctoral position at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (USA). He began his independent research career at the University of Bath where he held a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. His research combines technique development and applications at the interface between solid-state chemistry and physics. He was awarded the EU-40 prize from the Materials Research Society for his work on the theory of solar energy materials, as well as the 2019 Corday-Morgan Prize for his contributions to computational chemistry. He is featured in the Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers List and is Associate Editor for Journal of the American Chemical Society covering energy materials and machine learning.

Mirjana Dimitrievska is a materials scientist at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). She obtained her PhD in physics at the University of Barcelona, Spain (2016). Afterwards, she moved to the United States where she was working as a research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In 2020, she moved to Switzerland and joined EPFL.
Her research is focused on discovering and optimizing functional materials for solar cells and solid state battery applications. Currently at EPFL she is leading the SMARTCELL project with the aim of developing sustainable and renewable materials for ultrathin, flexible, and transparent solar cells, which can be used for everything from zero-energy buildings to smart sensors for the Internet-of-Things. In addition to her research activities, she is a promoter of science to children.
She is author of more than 60 scientific publications, has received an award for the most outstanding PhD thesis at the University of Barcelona, and Zonta Award for young woman scientist performing outstanding research in sustainable materials for renewable energy generation and storage. She is also a recipient of two Marie Curie Fellowships from European Commission.

Charlotte Platzer-Björkman is professor in Solid State Electronics at the Department of materials science and engineering, Uppsala University, Sweden, since 2016. She received her PhD in 2006 from the same university, on interfaces in CIGS-based thin film solar cells with focus on atomic layer deposition and photoelectron spectroscopy. She did a post doc in the silicon solar cell group at the Institute for Energy Technology, Norway 2009 and started working with CZTS solar cells in 2010. She was awarded a Wallenberg Academy Fellowship in 2012 and is currently leading a framework research program on thin film solar cells funded by the Swedish Strategic Research Foundation. Her CZTS team has focused on two-stage, vacuum based processing of CZTS with compound and reactive sputtering of precursors. The research covers fundamental aspects of efficiency limitations from interface and bulk properties and process optimization with industry collaborations.

Byungha Shin is Associate Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE), Associate Vice President of Office of Student Life, and Director of Global Leadership Center at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon, Korea. Prof. Shin received B.S. in MSE from Seoul National University in 2000, M.S. in MSE from the University of Michigan in July 2002, and Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Harvard University in 2007. From May 2007 to March 2010, he was a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of MSE at Stanford University. From May 2010 until he joined KAIST in Feb 2014, he worked at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center as a post-doctoral researcher and a Research Staff Member. He also spent seven months from Aug 2018 to Feb 2019 as a visiting Professor at Columbia University.
His past research experience includes study of thin film growth kinetics and high-k dielectric materials for microelectronic applications. His current primary research interest is developing novel materials for energy applications with the current emphasis on hybrid perovskite optoelectronic devices (PV, LED and radiation-detector), chalcogenide thin film solar cells, and photoelectrochemical water splitting and electrochemical nitrogen reduction.
He has published over 100 SCI journal papers including Science (2020) and Nature (2019), and he has given over 100 invited talks at various academic institutes and international conferences. He was a recipient of “Scientist of the Month” and “100 Outstanding Research Achievements”, both by Ministry of Science and ICT of Korean Government in 2021, “The 2020 KASTian of the Year Award” by KAIST in 2020, and “KAIST’s Top 10 Research Achievements of 2019” by KAIST in 2019.

Susanne Siebentritt is a physics professor and heads the laboratory for photovoltaics at the University of Luxembourg.

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. Her interest in thin film solar cells is kindled by the fact that they present the electricity source with the lowest carbon footprint.

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 2007 she moved to Luxembourg to establish the laboratory for photovoltaics.

She is the author of 230 peer reviewed publications. 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.

Su-Huai Wei is a Chair Professor and Head of the Materials and Energy Division of the Beijing Computational Science Research Center (CSRC). He received his Ph.D. from the College of William and Mary in 1985. After that, he joined the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and was a Laboratory Fellow and Manager of the Theoretical Materials Science Group before he joined the CSRC in 2015. His research is focused on developing electronic structure theory of semiconductors, alloys and low-dimensional materials for optoelectronic and energy applications. He is a Fellow of both of the American Physical Society and the Materials Research Society.