Advancing Perovskite-Based Photovoltaics

                                  
                                                                        

Barry Rand earned a BE in electrical engineering from The Cooper Union in 2001. Then he received MA and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from Princeton University, in 2003 and 2007, respectively. From 2007 to 2013, he was at imec in Leuven, Belgium, ultimately as a principal scientist, researching the understanding, optimization, and manufacturability of thin-film solar cells.

Since 2013, he is jointly appointed between the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton University. Prof. Rand’s research interests highlight the border between electrical engineering, materials science, chemistry, and applied physics, covering electronic and optoelectronic thin-films and devices. He has authored over 200 refereed journal publications, holds 25 US patents, and has received the 3M Nontenured Faculty Award (2014), DuPont Young Professor Award (2015), DARPA Young Faculty Award (2015), ONR Young Investigator Program Award (2016), and Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Experimental Physics Investigators Initiative award (2023).

Stefan W. Glunz received his Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg, Germany, in 1995. He is a full professor of Photovoltaic Energy Conversion at Albert-Ludwigs-University in Freiburg and the director of the Photovoltaics division at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems, ISE. His research focuses on the development and characterization of high-efficiency crystalline silicon, III-V, organic, and perovskite solar cells.

Prof. Dr. Glunz has authored or co-authored over 200 journal articles and 300 conference papers. He serves on the scientific committees of various photovoltaics conferences and workshops, initiated the SiliconPV conference, and organized the tandemPV workshop in 2022. He was awarded the Eni Award in 2008 for his contributions to renewable energy science and technology and the Becquerel Award in 2014 for Outstanding Merits in Photovoltaics. 

Annamaria Petrozza leads the “Advanced Materials for Optoelectronics” research group and she is the Coordinator of the Center for Nano Science and Technology of the Italian Institute of Technology. She received her PhD in Physics in 2009 from the University of Cambridge (UK). From 2008 to 2010 she worked as a staff scientist at the Sharp Laboratories of Europe, Ltd (Oxford, UK) on the development of new market competitive solar cell technologies.

She got the “Innovators Under 35 Italy 2014” award by the MIT Technology Review for her pioneering work on perovskites. She has been selected among the “Emerging Investigators 2017” by the Royal Society of Chemistry. In 2022 she was awarded “The Innovation in Materials Characterization Award” by the Materials Research Society which honors an outstanding advance in materials characterization. Since 2023 she has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Shuxia Tao is Associate Professor of Computational Materials Physics at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), The Netherlands. Her research explores the fundamental interactions between electrons, spins, and ions in emerging semiconductors and functional nanomaterials, with a focus on defect physics, light–matter interaction, and degradation mechanisms. She develops multiscale modeling frameworks that combine density functional theory (DFT), molecular dynamics, and machine learning.

Shuxia earned her MSc in Physical Chemistry from Nankai University and her PhD from TU/e in 2011, where she focused on computational materials design for energy devices. After a short family leave, she worked at NIKHEF (Amsterdam) from 2013 to 2016 on computational photodetector design. She joined TU/e's Department of Applied Physics in 2016, was appointed Assistant Professor in 2018, and promoted to Associate Professor in 2023.

Her work is supported by multiple prestigious national and EU grants, including NWO VIDI, and the ERC Consolidator Grant. She serves as Associate Editor for AI for Science (IOP Publishing) and Editorial Board Member of Applied Physics Letters. Nationally, she contributes to Dutch research policy via the NWO Round Table Physics and as vice-chair of the Nano, Quantum, and Materials Physics community.

Aleksandra B. Djurišić obtained Ph. D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the School of Electrical Engineering, the University of Belgrade in 1997. After finishing her PhD studies, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at University of Hong Kong and as an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellow at TU Dresden. She joined the Dept. of Physics at the University of Hong Kong in 2003 as assistant professor, where she has worked as a professor 2013. Her research interests include halide perovskite materials, nanomaterials, wide-bandgap semiconductors, and organic materials, and their applications in areas related to energy and environment, such as photocatalysis, antimicrobial materials, solar cells, and LEDs. She has published 420 research articles listed in WoS, and her work has been cited over 27100 times. Her h-index is 71.

Jun Hong Noh is a professor affiliated with the School of Civil, Environmental & Architectural Engineering and the Department of Integrative Energy Engineering at Korea University. He earned his BS and PhD degrees in material science and engineering from Seoul National University in 2003 and 2009, respectively. Prior to joining Korea University in 2017, he held a senior researcher position at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology (KRICT) from 2011 to 2017. His primary research interests revolve around halide perovskite solar cells. He has made significant contributions to the development of high-quality halide perovskite thin films, device architectures, and the composition of halide perovskites for use in solar cells. His current research focus is on oxide and halide semiconductors, aiming to enhance the stability and commercial viability of perovskite solar cells. He was selected as the world's Highly Cited Researchers (HCR) in 2018-2024 by Clarivate and he was honored as a Young Academician Member of the Korean Academy of Science and Technology.

Prof. Michael Graetzel studied chemistry at the Free University of Berlin and performed his doctoral thesis work in at the Technical University Berlin. followed by postdoctoral stay at University of Notre Dame, Indiana (USA). After a brief return to Berlin, during which Michael obtained his Habilitation in Physical Chemistry at the Free University under the guidance of Professor Heinz Gerischer, he moved to Lausanne Switzerland, in 1977 where he joined the EPFL faculty first as a professor. It was at EPFL that Michael started his pioneering research on colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals and there use for solar energy conversion and storage which lead to several ground breaking discoveries. These generated new research fronts worldwide in the domain of photovoltaics, electrochemistry and photo-electrochemistry, addressing the urgent need to develop low-cost and efficient systems for the conversion of sunlight to electricity and chemical fuels. His publications have received over 500'000 citations (H-index = 312) showing the large scientific impact of his work.

Michael is particularly well known for his discovery of mesoscopic dye-sensitized solar cells (named after him “Graetzel cells”), which in turn engendered the advent of perovskite photovoltaics, constituting the most exciting breakthrough in the recent history of photovoltaics. He used his revolutionary concept of three-dimensional junctions of nanocrystals also to realize photo-electrochemical devices for the solar generation of hydrogen and reduction of carbon dioxide as well as for the storage of electricity in lithium-ion insertion batteries

Nam-Gyu Park is a Lifetime Distinguished Professor at the School of Chemical Engineering and Director of the SKKU Institute of Energy Science and Technology (SIEST) at Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU). He earned his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Seoul National University. After postdoctoral appointments at ICMCB-CNRS in France and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in the USA, he held key research roles at ETRI and KIST before joining SKKU in 2009. Prof. Park is a fellow of the Korean Academy of Science and Technology (KAST), and a world-renowned expert in photovoltaics, particularly known for pioneering the field of perovskite solar cells with his landmark 2012 report on long-term stable devices.

Recognized for his scientific leadership, Prof. Park was named a Citation Laureate in 2017 and has been included in the Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers list from 2017 to 2024. His numerous honors include the Samsung Ho-Am Prize (2018), the Rank Prize (UK, 2022), the Eni Award (Italy, 2024), and Korea’s Top Scientist and Technologist Award (2024). In addition to his research, Prof. Park plays a vital editorial role in the scientific community as Senior Editor of ACS Energy Letters and a board member for Chemical Reviews, ChemSusChem, and Solar RRL.

Mahshid Ahmadi is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) USA, and will be promoted to Associate Professor in August 2025. She earned her Ph.D. in 2013 from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She leads a pioneering program that combines autonomous high-throughput experimentation, hypothesis-driven synthesis, and interpretable machine learning to accelerate halide perovskites discovery and extract fundamental insights from complex datasets. Her work sits at the forefront of AI-driven materials science and aims to establish a predictive understanding of structure–property relationships in halide perovskites. She is the recipient of several prestigious honors, including the 2021 NSF CAREER Award, 2022 Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in Chemistry, and 2025 Scialog Fellowship in Automated Chemical Laboratories from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA).

She was named a 2024 Early Career Rising Star in Materials Science by ACS Materials Au, received the 2024 UTK Tickle College of Engineering Professional Promise in Research Award, and the 2022 UTK MSE Faculty Award for Excellence in Research. Dr. Ahmadi has contributed to national conversations on the future of automation and AI in science, serving as an invited panelist for the NSF–Carnegie Mellon National Network of Cloud and Self-Driving Labs (2023), and has been featured twice by MRS Women in Science (2022 & 2023) on International Women’s Day. She serves as an Associate Editor for APL Machine Learning and has authored or co-authored approximately 100 peer-reviewed publications and delivered over 40 invited talks at leading national and international conferences.

Prof. Jingjing Xue currently holds an appointment in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at Zhejiang University. She received her bachelor degree in chemistry at Nanjing University and Ph.D degree in Department of Materials Science and Engineering at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Xue’s group at Zhejiang University now pursues innovations in energy and environmental technologies. Her research focused on new-generation materials and devices for photovoltaics. She has published over 50 peer-review papers, including ~30 papers published as a first author or corresponding author on high-impact journals, e.g. Nature, Science, Nat. Photonics, Nat. Chemistry, Nat. Energy, Nat. Rev. Mater., Nat. Comm., etc. She has been named to the Forbes China 30 under 30 for 2021 and MIT Technology Review "Innovators Under 35", Asia Pacific, in 2022. She also served as a peer reviewer for many journals such as Nature, Nat. Photon., Nat. Comm., etc.

Jangwon Seo is a KAIST endowed chair professor in the Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from Seoul National University in 1998, 2000, and 2006, respectively. Then, he worked at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York, as a postdoctoral researcher. Before joining KAIST in 2021.5, he was a senior/principal researcher at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology (KRICT) from 2013 to 2021.4. His research has focused on the development of efficient & stable hybrid perovskite solar cells, scale-up fabrication and organic-polymer semiconductors for opto-electronic applications. He has published over 100 research papers in leading journals including Nature, Nature Energy and Nature Communications. According to Google Scholar, his scholarly work has acquired 41,199 citations, earning him an h-index of 55. His work has been recognized with inclusion in the Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers list in 2022 and 2023.

Hairen Tan is a distinguished full professor at the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Nanjing University. He received the PhD degree with cum laude from Delft University of Technology in 2015 and further continued his research expertise during a postdoctoral fellowship in Professor Ted Sargent’s group at the University of Toronto from 2015 to 2018, funded by Rubicon Fellowship.

Dr. Tan's research focuses on the development of high-efficiency and cost-effective photovoltaic devices, with a specialized focus on perovskite solar cells and perovskite-based tandem solar cells. His groundbreaking work has led to the establishment of seven world records for the efficiency of all-perovskite solar cells, underscoring his significant contributions to the field. He has published more than 100 papers in journals such as Science, Nature, and Nature Energy, with over 20,000 citations, earning him recognition as a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher in 2021-2024.

Dr. Tan founded Renshine Solar company in 2021 to advance the commercialization of perovskite photovoltaics. He is also an external editor for Communications Materials and serves on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Semiconductors and Science China Materials.

Yi Hou is a Presidential Young Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Since 2020, he has led the Perovskite-based Multijunction Solar Cell Group at the Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore (SERIS). He holds a Ph.D. (SAOT Scholarship) in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, followed by postdoctoral research at the University of Toronto's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He has also been a visiting scholar at Oxford University, EPFL, Australian National University, and Stanford University. Prof. Hou was recognized as an MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35 (Asia Pacific) for his work in perovskite-based tandem solar cells. He has published over 100 research papers in leading journals such as Science, Nature, Nature Energy, Nature Materials, Nature Photonics, Nature Electronics, and Nature Nanotechnology, accumulating over 14,000 citations. His work has been recognized with inclusion in Clarivate Analytics' Highly Cited Researchers list in the Cross-Field category for three consecutive years (2022, 2023, and 2024). Since 2023, he has also served as an Editor for the IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics.

To transition these advancements from NUS labs to commercialization, Prof. Hou founded Singfilm Solar as an NUS spin-off. With the completion of its pilot production line in Singapore in 2024, the company now has the capacity to produce millions of solar cells annually, establishing itself as one of the largest commercial perovskite solar cell manufacturers.

Dr. Yue Hu is a lecturer at the School of Chemistry, the University of Edinburgh. She completed her PhD in Chemistry in 2016 and won a Fraser and Stoddart Prize in 2017. She was a research fellow at the Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics (WNLO) in Huazhong University of Science and Technology since 2016 and has been an Associate Professor in 2018. In 2023, she moved to Edinburgh. Her current research interest is focused on the chemistry and physics of materials for photovoltaic applications. 

Leite is a Professor in Materials Science and Engineering and a Chancellor’s Fellow at UC Davis (USA). She has >80 publications (with 34 journal covers) and has delivered >200 invited talks at conferences and research institutions around the globe. Leite is a Fellow of Optica and of SPIE, a senior member of IEEE, an associate editor of APL Materials, a 2025 ACS Energy Lectureship Award finalist, an awardee of the 2022 Chancellor Fellowship from UC Davis, the 2016 APS Ovshinsky Sustainable Energy Fellowship from the American Physical Society, and of the 2014 Maryland Academy of Sciences Outstanding Young Scientist Award.

Her research interests encompass materials for sustainability ranging from halide perovskites to metallic alloys, including the visualization of dynamic processes at the nanoscale and the use of AI to forecast their behavior. Before joining UC Davis, Leite was an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. She also worked at NIST and was a post-doctoral scholar at Caltech. Under her guidance, the researchers in the group have received >90 awards in the last 12 years. Leite’s research has been supported by several programs from DARPA, NSF, and ARO.

Aldo Di Carlo is a Full Professor at the Department of Electronic Engineering at the University of Rome Tor Vergata (Italy), Director of the Institute of Structure of Matter of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR-ISM), and President of the CNR Research Area of Rome – RM2, which includes more than 10 research institutes. Di Carlo founded and directed from 2006 to 2019,  the Center for Hybrid and Organic Solar Energy (CHOSE), which comprises more than 60 PhD students and experienced researchers in the emerging field of photovoltaics. Additionally, he served as Chairman of the Scientific Council of the Dyepower consortium for the development and industrialization of Dye Solar Cells (DSCs).

Di Carlo's research interests include the study, design, and optimization of electronic and optoelectronic devices. His work has focused on the development and scaling-up of emerging photovoltaic technologies, with particular emphasis on Dye Solar Cells (DSCs) and Perovskite Solar Cells for industrial applications. He has authored or co-authored over 600 international scientific publications and holds 13 international patents. Furthermore, he has served as general coordinator or partner coordinator in more than 25 large European projects.

Monica Morales-Masis is Professor at the University of Twente (UT), The Netherlands which she joined in 2018. From 2013 to 2018, she was postdoc and later team leader of the TCO group at the Photovoltaics and Thin-Film Electronics Laboratory (PVLab) of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. She earned her Ph.D. in Physics from Leiden University (NL) in 2012, following earlier studies in Costa Rica and the United States. She has also been a visiting scholar at the National Institute of Materials Science (NIMS) in Japan and the Lawrence Berkeley National laboratory (LBNL) in US.

Her current research program focuses on the development and understanding of functional optoelectronic thin-film materials, including metal halide perovskites, transparent conducting oxides, and p-type transparent conducting materials. These materials have applications in energy conversion devices such as solar cells, light-emitting diodes and transparent electronics. Her research group uses and develops physical vapor deposition processes to enable integration of these thin film materials into devices such as silicon-based and perovskite solar cells. Monica is an expert is transparent conductive oxides (TCOs) and has recently pioneered single-source laser deposition of metal halide perovskites. Her research program is financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), European Research Council (ERC) Starting and Proof-of Concept grants, and the SolarNL Dutch National Growth Program.

Nitin P. 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 (USA). He received B.Tech. in Metallurgical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay (1985), M.S. in Ceramic Engineering from Alfred University (1987), and Ph.D. in Materials Science & Engineering from Lehigh University (1991). Padture was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology for 3 years, before joining the University of Connecticut (UConn) faculty in January 1995 as Assistant Professor. He became Associate Professor in 1998 and Professor in 2003. Padture served as Interim Department Head at UConn for one year before moving to The Ohio State University (OSU) in January 2005. At OSU he was College of Engineering Distinguished Professor, and also founding Director of the National Science Foundation funded Materials Research Science and Engineering Center. Padture moved to Brown University in January 2012, and most recently he served as Director of Brown's Institute for Molecular and Nanoscale Innovation for about eight years.

Padture’s research interests are in advanced composite, coating, and thin-film materials, for applications ranging from jet engines to emerging solar photovoltaics, impacting the transportation and energy sectors of the economy. Padture has authored or co-authored about 300 publications, including 9 awarded patents, which have been widely cited. He has delivered about 300 invited/ keynote/ plenary talks and seminars in the US and abroad. A Fellow of the American Ceramic Society, Padture has received that society's Roland B. Snow, Robert L. Coble, and Richard M. Fulrath awards. He is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Materials Research Society. Padture has receive several awards, including the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, the IIT-Bombay Distinguished Alumnus Award, and the Brown University Presidential Faculty Award. Padture is editor of two prestigious journals in the field of materials science & engineering: Acta Materialia and Scripta Materialia.

Angèle Reinders is a professor of 'Design of Sustainable Energy Systems' in the Energy Technology Group at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. She aims at an optimal use and integration of sustainable energy technologies in products, buildings and local infrastructures. In this design-driven research theme improved designs of photovoltaic energy applications are explored from an interdisciplinary perspective, and also developed by means of simulation, prototyping and testing. Her focus is on - but not limited to - optimized applications of solar energy technologies in buildings and mobility.

Angèle Reinders studied experimental physics at Utrecht University, where she also received her doctoral degree (1999). In the past she held positions at Utrecht University, Delft University of Technology, University of Twente, Solliance, Fraunhofer Institute of Solar Energy, the World Bank in the USA, ENEA in Italy, Center of Urban Energy in Toronto, UNSW in Australia and in Indonesia.  She wrote several books, such as “Designing with Photovoltaics” (2020), “The Power of Design” (2012) and “Photovoltaic Solar Energy From Fundamentals to Applications” (Volume 1 in 2017, Volume 2 in 2024) and she co-founded the Journal of Photovoltaics. She has been involved in the PVPS program of the International Energy Agency, among which Task 17 on PV for Transport and Task 1 on Strategic PV Analysis & Outreach.

Hongxia Wang is a Professor and Australian Research Council (ARC) Georgina Sweet Laureate Fellow at Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Her research focuses on developing sustainable approaches for fabricating cost-effective solar cells and energy storage devices with enhanced performance and longevity. She has conducted extensive research on sensitized solar cells, perovskite solar cells, CZTS-based thin-film solar cells, supercapacitors, and batteries. She is an elected Fellow of the Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC), and the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (FRACI). Additionally, she serves as a member of the Australian Research Council (ARC) College of Experts (2020–2025).

Her achievements have been recognized with multiple awards, including the ‘Solar Energy Journal Best Paper Award for 2016 in Photovoltaics’ (International Solar Energy Society) and ‘the Best Research Paper Award in Manufacturing and Material Science’ (China Association for Science and Technology, 2023). She was a recipient of several prestigious fellowships, such as the ARC Laureate Fellowship (2024), ARC Future Fellowship (2012), ARC Postdoctoral Fellowship (Industry, APDI, 2007), and QUT Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellowship (2010). She was awarded QUT’s ‘Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Excellence’ in 2024 and ‘Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Best Research with Real-World Impact’ in both 2015 and 2017.

 

Marc Köntges received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Oldenburg,
Germany, in 2002 for his research in thin-film solar cells. From 2002 to
2005 he led the thin-film technology group at Institute for Solar Energy
Research Hamelin (ISFH), and became 2005 the head of the module and
interconnection technology group and switched 2022 to head the Photovoltaic
Reliability group. He is currently working on the development of
characterization methods for PV modules with a focus on the reliability of
PV modules.

The Feldmann Lab at EPFL develops and employs ultrafast magneto-chiroptical spectroscopy to understand the next generation of soft semiconductors. The overarching goal is to maximize energy efficiency for a sustainable future by unlocking applications ranging from flexible light-weight solar cells & displays all the way to entirely new applications in quantum information processing.

 Sascha studied Chemistry at Heidelberg University and completed his PhD in Physics at the University of Cambridge in 2020, where he continued to work as an independent EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellow. In July 2022, Sascha started his own group at Harvard University through a Rowland Fellowship. Since 2024 he is a tenure-track assistant professor and head of the Laboratory for Energy Materials at EPFL, while also remaining affiliated as SCR member of Winthrop House at Harvard.

Recent recognitions include his listing as Forbes 30 under 30, as C&EN’s Talented 12, the Wiley Young Innovator Award and an ERC Starting Grant.

 Yuanyuan (Alvin) Zhou is a university-endorsed Star Faculty and tenured Associate Professor at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). He is the Associate Director of the HKUST Energy Institute. He obtained his B.S. in materials science and engineering from Xi’an Jiaotong University and Ph.D. in engineering at Brown University (2012-2016).

He has co-authored over 140 journal publications with 14,000 Google citations and 60 H-index. He has received numerous prestigious honors and awards, including the China's National Science Foundation Excellent Young Scientist. He is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Energy Chemistry (Elsevier) and an Advisory Board Member for Device (Cell Press). Prof. Zhou’s group research innovates semiconductors and devices, as well as the way to study them. Their flagship contributions to elevating the understanding of the perovskite microstructure have been published in prestigious academic journals, including Science, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Energy, and Nature Synthesis.

Prof. Francesca Brunetti, FRSC, received her PhD in Telecommunications and Microelectronics from the University of Rome Tor Vergata in 2005. In 2005, she was awarded of a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship spent in the Institute for Nanoelectronics of the Technical University of Munich, Germany. In 2006 she became researcher in the Department of Electronic Engineering of the University of Rome Tor Vergata, and since 2018, she is associated professor at the same Department.

Cofounder of the Centre for Hybrid and Organic Solar Energy at the University of Rome Tor Vergata (CHOSE, www.chose.it) her current research is focused on the analysis, design and manufacture of electronic and optoelectronic devices through the use of organic and perovskites semiconductors realized on rigid and flexible substrates. In particular, she is working third-generation organic solar cells on flexible substrates, flexible perovskite solar cells and large area modules. Recently, she started an activity on the realization of supercapacitors on flexible and recyclable substrates, among which paper and their integration with photovoltaic devices (photocopacitors). Coordinator of several national and international projects, she is fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and Associated Editor of “Sustainable Energy and Fuels” a Royal Society of Chemistry Journal focused on renewables. She is the current director of CHOSE.

Dr. Yuetian Chen is an Associate Professor at the School of Environmental Science and Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU). An expert in materials chemistry, her research focuses on advancing perovskite solar cell technology, particularly through innovative interface engineering and the development of colloidal nanocrystals. After earning her Ph.D. in Chemistry from Syracuse University, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at SJTU before joining the faculty. Her work has been published in over 40 papers in top-tier journals, including Nature, J. Am. Chem. Soc., and Angew. Chem. Int. Ed.. She is a recipient of the Shanghai Pujiang Talent Program and has led projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

Kaining Ding studied material science at the RWTH-Aachen University in Germany. He is with the Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany since 2010 and currently leading the silicon heterojunction solar cells and modules department at Forschungszentrum Jülich. Research experience and interest include silicon heterojunction and perovskite-silicon tandem solar cells and modules.

Dr. Tobias Abzieher is a Senior R&D Engineer at Swift Solar Inc., where he leads efforts to commercialize high-efficiency perovskite solar technologies by developing industrially viable absorber deposition strategies. He earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in 2019 and carried out postdoctoral research at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) from 2021 to 2023. His work centers on vapor-processed perovskite thin films, their transition to scalable manufacturing, and perovskite-based multi-junction photovoltaics in general. Earlier in his career, he conducted research at the Center for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW), focusing on kesterite- and CIGS-based photovoltaics.

Dr Frank Schoofs CEng FIMMM is the Head of Research at Oxford PV. Oxford PV is a world leader in high performance perovskite-based solar cells. Prior to joining Oxford PV, Frank lead projects on space-based solar power for Space Solar while at the Satellite Applications Catapult and on different aspects of nuclear fusion at the UK Atomic Energy Authority, ranging from superconducting magnets, to additive manufacturing, to the use of virtual reality for engineering design. 

Dr. Buyi Yan is co-founder and CTO of Hangzhou Microquanta Semiconductor Co., Ltd.. He has been leading the R&D and production departments of Microquanta since 2015. He is an inventor of more than 300 patents. His specialty is in thin film photovoltaic process, equipment and massive manufacturing.

Steve received his PhD in physics from the University of Potsdam for his work on understanding the conversion of photon to collected charges organic solar cells. For his PhD he was awarded with the Carl-Ramsauer-Prize of the Physikalische Gesellschaft zu Berlin and the Young Researcher Prize of the Leibniz-Kolleg Potsdam. After PhD he started as Postdoc at HZB and in 2016 he established a young investigator research group and in 2017 the HySPRINT Innovation Lab. In 2018, he was granted with the apple of inspiration award by the Slovenian President followed by the Karl-Scheel-Preis of the Physikalische Gesellschaft zu Berlin and the Berliner Wissenschaftspreis in the category young scientists for his work on perovskite-based tandem solar cells. Since June 2022, he is heading the department for perovskite tandem solar cells at HZB and since August 2022 he was promoted from Junior- to Full Professor at TU Berlin.

He and his team developed various high efficiency hybrid tandem solar cells such as organic/amorphous Silicon and Perovskite/ crystalline Silicon tandem solar cells. In recent years, his group enabled various certified efficiency records for Perovskite-based tandem solar cells such as 29.15%, 29.8%, and 32.5% for Perovskite/Silicon in 2020, 2021, and 2022 respectively, and 24.16% for Perovskite/CIGS in 2020