Richard Friend holds the Cavendish Professorship 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. His current research interests are directed to novel schemes – including ideas inspired by recent insights into Nature’s light harvesting – that seek to improve the performance and cost of solar cells.

René Janssen is university professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). He received his Ph.D. in 1987 from the TU/e for a thesis on electron spin resonance and quantum chemical calculations of organic radicals in single crystals. He was lecturer at the TU/e since 1984, and a senior lecturer in physical organic chemistry since 1991. In 1993 and 1994 he joined the group of Professor Alan J. Heeger (Nobel laureate in 2000) at the University of California Santa Barbara as associate researcher to work on the photophysical properties of conjugated polymers. Presently the research of his group focuses on functional conjugated molecules and macromolecules as well as hybrid semiconductor materials that may find application in advanced technological applications. The synthesis of new materials is combined with time-resolved optical spectroscopy, electrochemistry, morphological characterization and the preparation of prototype devices to accomplish these goals. René Janssen has co-authored more than 600 scientific papers. He is co-recipient of the René Descartes Prize from the European Commission for outstanding collaborative research, and received the Research Prize of The Royal Institute of Engineers and in The Netherlands for his work. In 2015 René Janssen was awarded with the Spinoza Prize of The Dutch Research Council.

Sang Il Seok is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Energy and Chemical Engineering at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) in Korea. He obtained his Ph.D. in the Department of Inorganic Materials Engineering from Seoul National University in Korea. After completing his Ph.D., he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University in the USA, where he investigated defects and transport in the Fe-Ti-O Spinel structure. He also experienced a visiting scholar at the University of Surrey in UK in 2003 and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland in 2006. Prior to joining UNIST in 2015, he served as the principal investigator of the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology (KRICT) and as a professor at the Department of Energy Science at Sungkyunkwan University. He is a highly cited researcher, selected by Clarivate Analytics since 2018, and has published over 200 peer-reviewed papers, including three Nature and seven Science articles as a corresponding author. He has received several awards for his excellence, such as the "Korean Scientist Award" from the Korean government in 2017, and the Kyung-Ahm Prize in 2019. In 2022, he was awarded the Rank Prize, recognized as one of the seven scientists pioneering in perovskite solar cells. His research focuses on functional inorganic-organic hybrid materials and devices, particularly on perovskite solar cells.

Christoph J. Brabec is holding the chair “materials for electronics and energy technology (i-MEET)” at the materials science of the Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg. Further, he is the scientific director of the Erlangen division of the Bavarian research institute for renewable energy (ZAE Bayern, Erlangen).
He received his PhD (1995) in physical chemistry from Linz university, joined the group of Prof Alan Heeger at UCSB for a sabbatical, and continued to work on all aspects of organic semiconductor spectroscopy as assistant professor at Linz university with Prof. Serdar Sariciftci. He joined the SIEMENS research labs as project leader for organic semiconductor devices in 2001 and joined Konarka in 2004, where he was holding the position of the CTO before joining university.
He is author and co-author of more than 150 papers and 200 patents and patent applications, and finished his habilitation in physical chemistry in 2003.

Born in the Netherlands,David Cahen studied chemistry & physics at the Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem (HUJ), Materials Research and Phys. Chem. at Northwestern Univ, and biophysics of photosynthesis (postdoc) at HUJ and the Weizmann Institute of Science, WIS. After joining the WIS faculty he focused on alternative sustainable energy resources, in particular various types of solar cells. In parallel he researches hybrid molecular/non-molecular systems, focusing on understanding and controlling electronic transport across (bio)molecules. He is a fellow of the AVS and the MRS. He heads WIS' Alternative, sustainable energy research initiative.

Aldo Di Carlo is Director of the Institute of Structure of Matter of the National Research Council and Full Professor of Optoelectronics and Nanoelectronics at the Department of Electronics Engineering of the University of ROme "Tor Vergata". His research focuses on the study and fabrication of electronic and optoelectronic devices, their analysis and their optimization. Di Carlo founded the Center for Hybrid and Organic Solar Cells (CHOSE) which nowadays involve more than40 researchers dealing with the development of III generation solar cells (DSC, OPV and Perovskite) and on scaling-up of these technologies for industrial applications. CHOSE has generated 6 spin-off companies and a public/private partnership. Di Carlo is author/coauthor of more than 500 scientific publications in international journals, 13 patents and has been involved in several EU projects (three as EU coordinator)

Dr. Hongwei Han is Professor at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) / Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics (WNLO), and Distinguished Professor of ‘ChangJiang Scholars Program’. He obtained his bachelor degree from the College of Chemistry and Molecular Science in 2000 and his doctor degree from the School of Physics and Technology in 2005 at Wuhan University. And then, Dr. Han continued his research work at Monash University of Australia as Postdoc. After that he joined HUST and WNLO in 2008 and began to establish his group of Printable Mesoscopic Photovoltaics & Optoelectronics. Since 2000, Dr. Han has worked on the fully printable mesoscopic solar cells. The characteristic of such device is to print nanocrystalline layer, spacer layer and counter electrode layer on a single conductive substrates layer-by-layer, and then sensitized with dye and filled with electrolyte (or filled with perovskite materials directly). In 2015 his group fabricated 7m2 fully printable mesoscopic perovskite solar module. His more than 60 peer-reviewed publications in Science、 Nature Chemistry、 Nature Communications、J. Am. Chem. Soc.、Energy Environ. Sci. et al. have been published and 15 Patents have been applied within past five years.

Professor Anna Köhler holds a chair of experimental physics at the University of Bayreuth. She received her PhD in 1996 from the University of Cambridge, UK, where she continued her research funded through Research Fellowships by Peterhouse and by the Royal Society. In 2003 she was appointed professor at the University of Potsdam, Germany, from where she moved in 2007 to the University of Bayreuth, Germany. Her research is concerned with photophysical processes in organic and hybrid semiconductors. She focusses in particular on the processes of energy and charge transfer in singlet and triplet excited states, the exciton dissociation mechanism and intermolecular/interchain interactions.

Professor Kwanghee currently leads research and development program of organic solar cells in Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) as a director of the Research Institute of Solar and Sustainable Energies (RISE). He is also appointed as a “Distinguished Professor” of the School of Materials Science and Engineering of GIST. Dr. Lee started his professorship at Pusan National University in 1997 after finishing his Ph.D. and Post-Doc at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB). Then he moved to GIST in 2007 and have organized and acted as a co-director of the Heeger Center for Advanced Materials (HCAM) together with the director, Professor Alan J. Heeger, who is a 2000 year Nobel Laureate in Chemistry. Now Dr. Lee is a leading scientist in the area of “plastic electronics” including organic solar cells, polymer LEDs, and organic FETs. Dr. Lee finished his B.S. in Nuclear Engineering at Seoul National University and M.S. in Physics at KAIST. Then he earned his Ph.D. in Physics at UCSB (USA) under the guidance of Prof. Heeger with a subject of metallic and semiconducting polymers.

Jenny Nelson is a Professor of Physics at Imperial College London, where she has researched novel varieties of material for use in solar cells since 1989. Her current research is focussed on understanding the properties of molecular semiconductor materials and their application to organic solar cells. This work combines fundamental electrical, spectroscopic and structural studies of molecular electronic materials with numerical modelling and device studies, with the aim of optimising the performance of plastic solar cells. She has published around 200 articles in peer reviewed journals, several book chapters and a book on the physics of solar cells.

Thuc-Quyen Nguyen is a professor in the Center for Polymers and Organic Solids and the Chemistry & Biochemistry Department at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She received her Ph.D. degree in physical chemistry from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2001 under the supervision of Professor Benjamin Schwartz. Her thesis focused on photophysics of conducting polymers. She was a research associate in the Department of Chemistry and the Nanocenter at Columbia University working with Professors Louis Brus and Colin Nuckolls on molecular self-assembly, nanoscale characterization and molecular electronics. She also spent time at IBM Research Center at T. J. Watson (Yorktown Heights, NY) working with Richard Martel and Phaedon Avouris. Her current research interests are structure-function-property relationships in organic semiconductors, sustainable semiconductors, doping in organic semiconductors, interfaces in optoelectronic devices, bioelectronics, and device physics of OPVs, photodetectors, and electrochemical transistors. Recognition for her research includes 2005 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, 2006 NSF CAREER Award, 2007 Harold Plous Award, 2008 Camille Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award, the 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, 2015-2019 World’s Most InfluentialScientific 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), 2023 Wilhelm Exner Medal from Austria, 2023 Fellow of the US National Academy of Inventors, 2023 de Gennes Prize in Materials Chemistry from the Royal Society of Chemistry, 2023 Elected Member of the US National Academy of Engineering, 2024 Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences, and 2025 ACS Henry H. Storch Award in Energy Chemistry.

Hideo Ohkita is a Professor in the Department of Polymer Chemistry at Kyoto University.  He obtained a Doctoral degree in 1997 at Kyoto University.  He became an Assistant Professor in 1997, was promoted to Associate Professor in 2006, and to Professor of Department of Polymer Chemistry at Kyoto University in 2016.  He concurrently worked as an academic visitor with Professor Durrant at Imperial College London from 2005 to 2006, and as a researcher in the Precursory Research for Embryonic Science and Technology (PRESTO) program “Photoenergy Conversion Systems and Materials for the Next Generation Solar Cells”, Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), from 2009 to 2015.  His research interests include studying photophysics and photochemistry in polymer systems.  His current research focuses on spectroscopic approach to polymer solar cells.

Prof. Yabing Qi is Unit Director of Energy Materials and Surface Sciences Unit at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (https://groups.oist.jp/emssu). He received his B.S., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Nanjing University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and University of California Berkeley, respectively. Prof. Qi has published 70+ research articles (30+ articles on perovskite solar cells) and is the inventor for 11 patents/patent applications. His research interests include perovskite solar cells, surface/interface sciences, lithium-ion batteries, organic electronics, energy materials and devices.

Professor Erwin Reisner received his education and professional training at the University of Vienna (PhD in 2005), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (postdoc from 2005-2007) and the University of Oxford (postdoc from 2008-2009). He joined the University of Cambridge as a University Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry in 2010, became a Fellow of St. John’s College in 2011, was appointed to Reader in 2015 and to his current position of Professor of Energy and Sustainability in 2017. He started his independent research programme on artificial photosynthesis (solar fuels) with the support of an EPSRC Career Acceleration Fellowship (2009-2015), which also received substantial early support by the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Sustainable SynGas Chemistry (2012-2019). In 2016, he received a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant to develop the field of semi-artificial photosynthesis (biohybrid systems for solar fuel synthesis) and has recently been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant (now funded by the UKRI underwrite scheme) on semi-biological domino catalysis for solar chemical production. He is the academic lead (PI) of the Cambridge Circular Plastics Centre (CirPlas; since 2019), where his team develops solar-powered valorisation technologies for the conversion of solid waste streams (biomass and plastics) to fuels and chemicals. He has acted as the academic lead of the UK Solar Fuels Network, which coordinates the national activities in artificial photosynthesis (2017-2021) and is currently a co-director of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Integrated Functional Nano (nanoCDT) in Cambridge as well as a member of the European research consortia ‘Sofia’ and ‘solar2chem'.

Henry Snaith undertook his PhD at the University of Cambridge, working on organic photovoltaics, then spent two years at the EPFL as a post-doc working on dye-sensitized solar cells. Since 2007 he has held a professorship at the University of Oxford Clarendon Laboratory where his group researches organic, hybrid and perovskite optoelectronic devices. Professor Snaith was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2015, he is a 2017 Clarivate Citation Laureate, and among his awards are the 2017 Royal Society James Joule Medal and Prize. In 2010 he founded Oxford Photovoltaics Ltd. which is commercializing the perovskite solar technology transferred from his laboratory.

Ji-Seon Kim is Professor of Solid State Physics and Director of the Plastic Electronics Centre for Doctoral Training (https://www.imperial.ac.uk/plastic-electronics/) at Imperial College London. She has previously taken up an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge, obtained a PhD in Physics in 2000. Her research focuses on the basic science and technology of Nanoscale Functional Materials such as organics, organic/ inorganic hybrids, nanomaterials and their related applications, as well as developing novel Nanometrology for these functional materials (http://www.imperial.ac.uk/nanoanalysis-group).

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.

Professor Meredith is the Sêr Cymru Research Chair in Sustainable Advanced Materials at Swansea University Department of Physics in the United Kingdom where he also leads the newly established Centre for Integrative Semiconductor Materials. He is an Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland in Australia, and formerly an Australian Research Council Discovery Outstanding Researcher Award Fellow. He was educated in the UK at Swansea, Heriot-Watt and Cambridge Universities, and also spent six years as a senior scientist at Proctor and Gamble. His current research involves the development of new high-tech materials for applications such as optoelectronics and bioelectronics. He has particular interests and expertise in next generation semiconductors, functional surface coatings, solar energy systems, sensing and photodetection. Professor Meredith has published >250 papers and 29 patents and is co-founder of several start-up companies including XeroCoat and Brisbane Materials Technology. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the Premier of Queensland’s Sustainability Award (2013), is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales, a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and is widely recognised for his contributions to innovation and the promotion of renewable energy. He has served on several advisory bodies and boards including the Queensland Renewable Energy Target Public Enquiry Expert Panel and the ARENA Solar R&D Program Technical Advisory Board. In 2020 he received an OBE for services to materials research and innovation and was also appointed to the EPSRC’s Strategic Advisory Network in 2021.

Prof. Dieter Neher studied physics at the University of Mainz. In 1990 he gained his PhD with Prof. G. Wegner. From 1990-1992 he was a research associate at the Optical Sciences Centre, Tucson, Arizona and at the Centre for Research in Electrooptics and Lasers, Orlando, Florida with Prof. G. Stegeman. 1992 he joined again Prof. G. Wegner at the MPI-P, heading the group Electrooptical Phenomena in Polymers. Following his habilitation in November 1998, he became Professor of Soft Matter Physics at the Institute for Physics and Astronomy at the University of Potsdam. Current research interests are electrical, optical and optoelectronic processes in conjugated materials.