He studied electrical engineering in Stuttgart and started working on Si solar cells in 2004 under the guidance of Uwe Rau at the Institute for Physical Electronics (ipe) in Stuttgart. After finishing his undergraduate studies in 2006, he continued working with Uwe Rau first in Stuttgart and later in Juelich on simulations and electroluminescence spectroscopy of solar cells. After finishing his PhD in 2009 and 1.5 years of postdoc work in Juelich, Thomas Kirchartz started a three year fellowship at Imperial College London working on recombination mechanisms in organic solar cells with Jenny Nelson. In 2013, he returned to Germany and accepted a position as head of a new activity on hybrid and organic solar cells in Juelich and simultaneously as Professor for Photovoltaics with Nanostructured Materials in the department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at the University Duisburg-Essen. Kirchartz has published >100 isi-listed papers, has co-edited one book on characterization of thin-film solar cells whose second edition was published in 2016 and currently has an h-index of 38.

Annamaria Petrozza received her PhD in Physics from the University of Cambridge (UK) in 2008 with a thesis on the study of optoelectronic processes at organic and hybrid semiconductors interfaces under the supervision of Dr. J.S. Kim and Prof Sir R.H. Friend. From July 2008 to December 2009 she worked as research scientist at the Sharp Laboratories of Europe, Ltd on the development of new market competitive solar cell technologies (Dye Sensitized Solar cells/Colloidal Quantum Dots Sensitized Solar cells). Since January 2010 she has a Team Leader position at the Center for Nano Science and Technology -IIT@POLIMI. She is in charge of the development of photovoltaic devices and their characterization by time-resolved and cw Photoinduced Absorption Spectroscopy, Time-resolved Photoluminescence and electrical measurements. Her research work mainly aims to shed light on interfacial optoelectronic mechanisms, which are fundamental for the optimization of operational processes, with the goal of improving device efficiency and stability.

Prof. Aron Walsh holds the Chair in Materials Design at Imperial College London. He received his PhD in Chemistry from Trinity College Dublin and later worked at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, University College London, and the University of Bath. 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, and is an Associate Editor for the Journal of the American Chemical Society.