Invited Speakers

Challenges for highly efficient wide-gap chalcopyrite solar cells and completely buffer-free CIGS photovoltaic devices

Shogo Ishizuka is currently a chief senior researcher with the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Tsukuba in 2003 on the growth of oxide semiconductor Cu 2 O thin films for solar cell applications, and started working on Cu(In,Ga)Se 2 solar cells as a post-doc at AIST. In 2004, he joined the Research Center for Photovoltaics (RCPV), AIST, as a research scientist and continued studying CIGS solar cells. During 2011-2012, he stayed in the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), USA, as a visiting scientist for one year. His current research interests include chalcogenide materials and devices for photovoltaics and other wide variety of applications.

The interplay between off-stoichiometry and intrinsic point defects in quaternary compound semiconductors

Susan Schorr, was appointed as Professor for Geo-Materials Research at the FreieUniversitaet Berlin/Germany (2008) and became 2011 head of the Department Structureand Dynamics of Energy Materials at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin for Materials and Energy(HZB). She received her Diploma degree in crystallography from the Humboldt UniversityBerlin and a Ph.D. in physics from the Technical University Berlin.After a stay as visiting scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory/US, she joined theInstitute of Mineralogy, Crystallography and Materials Science at the UniversityLeipzig/Germany, where she developed the average neutron scattering length analysismethod to evaluate the materials intrinsic point defects.

New insights in the role of Sodium in chalcogenide photovoltaic thin films

Roland Scheer is a Professor for experimental physics, Department of Physics, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. In 2008-2010 he was Deputy head, Department Technology of Photovoltaics, Helmholtz-Centre, Berlin, Germany. His research Interests include: Materials for photovoltaics, Photovoltaic device analysis and simulation, Surface science, Photovoltaic modules and systems. He is also a founder of Sulfurcell Solartechnik GmbH, Invensor GmbH, and Picon-Solar

Probing stability in perovskite solar cells from the nano- to the macroscale

Leite is an Assistant Professor at UMD since Aug 2013. Her group investigates materials for energy-relevant technologies, including their nanoscale structural, electrical, and optical properties. Leite was an invited participant of the National Academy of Engineering 2017 EU- US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium, the awardee of the 2016 APS Ovshinsky Sustainable Energy Fellowship from the American Physical Society, and of the 2014 Maryland Academy of Sciences Outstanding Young Scientist Award. Before joining UMD, Leite worked for two years at NIST developing nanoscale metrologies and was a post-doctoral scholar at Caltech.

Band engineering of Cu chalcogenides for high efficiency solar cells

Takahiro Wada is a professor in the Department of Materials Chemistry at Ryukoku University, Japan. He served as a project leader of high-efficiency CIS solar cell research at Matsushita Electric (Panasonic) from 1991 to 1998. He is currently studying on materials and processing of various kinds of Cu chalcogenide thin film solar cells by combining experimental and theoretical approaches. Outside of his research, Wada organized ICTMC-15 (2006, Kyoto, Japan). He is a fellow of The Japan Society of Applied Physics (JSAP), and a chair of the Professional Group of Multinary Compounds and Solar Cells in JSAP.

Order-disorder properties and optoelectronic applications of II-IV-V2 semiconductors

Adele Tamboli is a scientist at the National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colorado with a joint appointment with Colorado School of Mines. Her research focuses on development of II-IV-V2 materials such as ZnGeP2 and ZnSnN2 for optoelectronic applications, as well as developing approaches for hybrid multijunction photovoltaics, which combine distinct classes of materials into high efficiency devices. These architectures enable the use of new materials or conventional III-V materials, as well as integration with silicon bottom cells. Adele received her Ph.D. in Materials from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she worked on GaN/InGaN nanocavity lasers, and was a postdoc at Caltech, where she studied III-V/Si microwire arrays for photovoltaics and solar fuel. She has a B.S. in Physics from Harvey Mudd College.

Ternary Compounds of Mn-Bi-Te family: electronic structure, optical properties and prospective application

Prof. Dr. Nazim T. Mamedov is the director of the institute of physics of Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences and the head of the laboratory of spectroscopic ellipsometry. His research activities are related to field-matter interaction in the radio to optical frequency range. DFT-based calculations of optical and other properties of the layered and linear-chain materials he is focused on are supplementary included in his research. He has more than 180 papers in peer-reviewed journals. Currently he is engaged in several projects related to ternary layered none-doped and magnetically-doped semiconductors with non-trivial topology, and to Tl-contained ternary layered and linear-chain semiconductors-ferroelectrics with high Seebeck coefficient.

Designing Metal Halide Perovskites Solar Cells to be Stable

Mike McGehee is a Professor in the Chemical and Biological Engineering Department at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is also a Fellow of the Materials Science and Engineering Program and the Renewable Energy and Sustainability Institute. He was a professor in the Materials Science and Engineering Department at Stanford University for 18 years and a Senior Fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy. 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.

Toward a paradigm of materials design: kinetic control in solid state chemistry

James Neilson is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry at Colorado State University, where his group is interested in selective bond making and breaking in solid-state chemistry to discover new functional electronic materials. He attended Lehigh University for his undergraduate studies in Materials Science & Engineering (2006) and followed his interest in making materials to the University of California Santa Barbara where he completed his doctoral research (2011) on understanding the influence of kinetics of hydrolysis on the atomic structures of materials, as inspired by biomineralization and supervised by Prof. Daniel Morse. During his postdoctoral studies at Johns Hopkins University with Prof. Tyrel McQueen, he worked on the chemistry and physics of strongly-correlated electronic materials.

Design of novel metastable semiconductor alloys

Sebastian Siol is a scientist at EMPA – Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology in the Laboratory for Joining Technologies and Corrosion. He obtained his PhD in Materials Science at the Technical University Darmstadt in the Surface Science Group (with W. Jaegermann), specializing in semiconductor band alignments and novel device concepts for thin film photovoltaics. Prior to joining EMPA, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher (with A. Zakutayev) at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, where he focused on the design and discovery of new materials and semiconductor alloys for energy applications using high-throughput experimental techniques. His current research topics include the investigation of functional oxides and oxide alloys as well as the development of nano-structured coatings.

Heterovalent ternary nitride semiconductors and halide perovskites

Walter R. L. Lambrecht obtained his Ph.D from Ghent University (Belgium) in 1980. He is currently a Professor of Physics at Case Western Reserve University. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and was recently awarded the Faculty Distinguished Research Award from his university. His research focuses on the application of first-principles computations on a variety of materials, from semiconductors to magnetic materials, along with the further development of the underlying methodologies. His work includes studies of wide-band gap semiconductors, chalcopyrites for non-linear optics, halide perovskites, magnetic semiconductors, transition metal and rare-earth nitrides..

Control of hetero-interface at CdS/CIGS for high-efficiency solar cells

Akira YAMADA received his Ph.D. degree in physical electronics from Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, in 1989. He is currently a Professor of Tokyo Institute of Technology. He is a renowned expert in thin-film solar cell device physics and technologies, and his group is now focusing on the investigation of chalcogenide thin-film solar cells. He is a co-author of more than 200 scientific publications and over 300 international conference presentations. He was a Technical Program Chair of PVSEC-27 (27^th International Photovoltaic Science and Engineering Conference, 2017) and a Conference Vice-Chair of WCPEC-7 (World Conference on Photovoltaic Energy Conversion, 2018).

Predictive Synthesis and Characterization of Oxide Films with Metastable Structures

Prof. Gregory S. Rohrer is the Head and W.W. Mullins Professor of the department of Materials Science and Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He is currently involved in research on crystal growth, surface photochemical reactions, and the relationship between interface properties and the microstructures of ceramics and metals. Prof. Rohrer is a fellow of the American Ceramic Society and his research has been recognized by a number of awards including the Richard M. Fulrath Award, the Robert B. Sosman Award, and the W. David Kingery Award, all of the American Ceramic Society.

Materials Informatics Search for Novel Multicomponent 2D Materials

Professor Hennig received his Diploma in Physics at the University of Göttingen in 1996 and his Ph.D. in Physics from Washington University in St. Louis in 2000. After working as a postdoctoral researcher and research scientist at Ohio State University, he joined the faculty of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Cornell in 2006 as an Assistant Professor. In 2014 he moved to the University of Florida as an Associate Professor. His research interest include 2D materials, materials interfaces, and materials informatics methods.

Chemical design of magnetic topological insulators and thermoelectric materials based on layered chalcogenides

Ziya Aliyev is Assoc. Prof. at Institute of Physics of Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences and Azerbaijan State Oil and Industry University. He studied Chemistry at the Baku State University and he obtained his PhD on Inorganic Chemistry in 2008. Since 2006, he worked in the field of materials design, synthesis, single crystal growth and structure, experimental investigation of the phase diagrams and thermodynamics of the multicomponent systems based on chalcogenides and chalcohalides of the some p-, d- and rare-earth elements (REE). Since 2011, he has joined a large research network among Spain, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Japan and Russia via the Donostia International Physics Center (Spain).

Diffusion Controlled Solid State Reactions: Systematic Structural Changes in Multinary Compounds by Design

David C. Johnson is the Rosaria Haugland Foundation Chair in Pure and Applied Chemistry at the University of Oregon. Johnson’s research is at the interface of chemistry and physics focused on controlling materials properties using nanoarchitecture. His non-traditional approach to chemical synthesis has led to many new materials with unprecedented physical properties. A recent example is the discovery of a new class of materials material with the lowest thermal conductivity ever reported for a fully dense solid. Johnson received his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1983 and worked as a research chemist for DuPont before coming to Oregon in 1986. He received the Oregon Academy of Science’s Outstanding Scientist Award in 2006. He has served as a Board Member for the International Thermoelectric Society and is a founding academic member of the Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnology Institute.- ONAMI. He was a Mercator Fellow of the DFG (the German Research Foundation) in 2013 at the University of Freiburg.

The challenge of defect identification in complex compounds - what can you do with positron annihilation spectroscopy?

Prof. Filip Tuomisto obtained his PhD in engineering physics from the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland, in 2005. He specializes in the development of experimental methods based on positron annihilation spectroscopy and in the application of these methods to studying defects in solids, in particular in semiconductors. At present he leads the positron physics research group of ~15 people (post-docs, PhD students) at Aalto University, Finland. He has published more than 200 papers.

Protonic Ceramic Electrochemical Cells for Power Generation and Renewable Fuels Production

Prof. O’Hayre’s group at the Colorado School of Mines develops new materials and devices to enable alternative energy technologies including fuel cells and solar cells. Prof. O’Hayre is lead author of Fuel Cell Fundamentals, the world’s best-selling textbook on fuel cell science and technology (translated into both Chinese and Korean) and has published >120 peer-reviewed publications in the field as well as several patents and book chapters. He has received several young-investigator research and teaching honors including the 2009 Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE), the US’s top honor for early-career scientists and engineers

Shining Light on Perovskite Chalcogenides: Semiconductors for Visible to Infrared Optoelectronics

Jayakanth Ravichandran is an Assistant Professor in the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at University of Southern California. He received his Ph.D. degree from University of California, Berkeley in 2011. He performed post-doctoral research at Columbia University and briefly at Harvard University, before joining the current position. His research interests are in materials design, synthesis, characterization, and physical properties of complex materials for electronic, photonic, and energy applications. He was named an Early Career Scholar by the Journal of Materials Research in 2017 and was a Link Energy Fellow