Filippo De Angelis is senior research scientist and a deputy director at the CNR Institute of Molecular Sciences and Technology, in Perugia, Italy. He is the founder and leader of the Computational Laboratory for Hybrid/Organic Photovoltaics. He earned a BS in Chemistry in 1996 and a PhD in Theoretical Inorganic Chemistry in 1999, both from the University of Perugia. He is an expert in the development and application of quantum mechanical methods to the study of hybrid/organic photovoltaics and materials for energy applications. He is Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences. He has published >270 papers with > 17000 citations.

Professor of Physical Chemistry at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) Michael Graetzel, PhD, directs there the Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces. He pioneered research on energy and electron transfer reactions in mesoscopic systems and their use to generate electricity and fuels from sunlight. He invented mesoscopic injection solar cells, one key embodiment of which is the dye-sensitized solar cell (DSC).  DSCs are meanwhile commercially produced at the multi-MW-scale and created a number of new applications in particular as lightweight power supplies for portable electronic devices and in photovoltaic glazings. They engendered the field of perovskite solar cells (PSCs) that turned our to be the most exciting break-through in the recent history of photovoltaics. He received a number of prestigious awards, of which the most recent ones include the RusNANO Prize, the Zewail Prize in Molecular Science, the Global Energy Prize, the Millennium Technology Grand Prize, the Samson Prime Minister’s Prize for Innovation in Alternative Fuels, the Marcel Benoist Prize, the King Faisal International Science Prize, the Einstein World Award of Science and the Balzan Prize. He is a Fellow of several learned societies and holds eleven honorary doctor’s degrees from European and Asian Universities. According to the ISI-Web of Science, his over 1500 publications have received some 230’000 citations with an h-factor of 219 demonstrating the strong impact of his scientific work.

Giulia is Associate Professor at Physical Chemistry Unit at University of Pavia, leading the PVsquared2 team, and running the European Grant ERCStG Project “HYNANO”aiming at the development of advanced hybrid perovskites materials and innovative functional interfaces for efficient, cheap and stable photovoltaics. Within this field, Giulia contributed to reveal the fundamental lightinduced dynamical processes underlying the operation of such advanced optoelectronic devices whose understanding is paramount for a smart device development and for contributing to the transition of a green economy.

Giulia received an MS in Physical Engineering in 2008 and obtained her PhD in Physics cum laude in 2012 at the Politecnico of Milan. Her experimental thesis focused on the realisation of a new femtosecond-microscope for mapping the ultrafast phenomena at organic interfaces. During her PhD, she worked for one year at the Physics Department of Oxford University where she pioneered new concepts within polymer/oxide solar cell technology. From 2012-2015, she was a post-doctoral researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology in Milan. In 2015, she joined the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) with a Co-Funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship. From 2016 to 2019, she has been awarded by the Swiss Ambizione Energy Grant providing a platform to lead her independent research group at EPFL focused on the developemnt of new generation hybrid perovskite solar cells.

She is author of 90 peer-reviewed scientific papers bringing her h-index to 44 (>13’000 citations), focused on developement and understanding of the interface physics which governs the operation of new generation solar cells.

Recently, she received the USERN prize in Physical Science, the Swiss Physical Society Award in 2018 for Young Researcher and the IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Optics. She is currently USERN Ambassador for Italy and board member of the Young Academy of Europe.

More can be found at https://pvsquared2.unipv.it.

Weblink: https://people.epfl.ch/giulia.grancini?lang=en

Laura Herz is a Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford. She received her PhD in Physics from the University of Cambridge in 2002 and was a Research Fellow at St John's College Cambridge from 2001 - 2003 after which she moved to Oxford. Her research interests lie in the area of organic and organic/inorganic hybrid semiconductors including aspects such as self-assembly, nano-scale effects, energy-transfer and light-harvesting for solar energy conversion.

Hugh Hillhouse is the Rehnberg Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Washington. Hugh earned a Master’s degree in Physics and a Doctorate in Chemical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts. After an NSF International Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience at Delft University in the Netherlands working with Teun Klapwijk on organic semiconductors, he started as an Assistant Professor at Purdue University in 2002 working on semiconductor nanocrystals and photovoltaics. He later spent a year on sabbatical at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden Colorado working with Matt Beard and Art Nozik on multiple exciton generation and quantum dot solar cells before moving to the University of Washington in 2010 as the Endowed Rehnberg Chair Professor. He was the Thin Film Photovoltaics thrust leader for the Bay Area Photovoltaic Consortium (BAPVC) and has organized symposia for the National Academy of Engineering’s Frontiers of Engineering along with MRS and E-MRS. He has been on the editorial or conference advisory boards for Chemistry of Materials and the International Conference on Ternary and Multinary Compounds. He has published ~100 peer-reviewed articles that have been cited ~8,800 times with an h-index of 42. His research interest lies at the nexus of materials chemistry and solar energy conversion. His most recent efforts focus on perovskite stability and data science/machine learning.

Leite is an Associate Professor in Materials Science and Engineering at UC Davis. Her group investigates materials for energy harvesting and storage, from their nano-scale structural, electrical, and optical properties to their implementation in devices. Before joining UC Davis, Leite was an associate professor at the University of Maryland, she worked for two years at NIST and was a post-doctoral scholar at Caltech (Department of Applied Physics and Materials Science). She received her PhD in physics from Campinas State University in Brazil and the Synchrotron Light Source Laboratory. Leite's work has been recognized on the cover of ~30 scientific journals, by the presentation of >140 invited talks, by the 2016 APS Ovshinsky Sustainable Energy Fellowship from the American Physical Society (APS) and the 2014 Maryland Academy of Sciences Outstanding Young Scientist Award. Leite’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Army Research Office (ARO), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), etc.

Prof. Mónica Lira-Cantú is Group Leader of the Nanostructured Materials for Photovoltaic Energy Group at the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (www.icn.cat located in Barcelona (Spain). She obtained a Bachelor in Chemistry at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education, ITESM Mexico (1992), obtained a Master and PhD in Materials Science at the Materials Science Institute of Barcelona (ICMAB) & Autonoma University of Barcelona (1995/1997) and completed a postdoctoral work under a contract with the company Schneider Electric/ICMAB (1998). From 1999 to 2001 she worked as Senior Staff Chemist at ExxonMobil Research & Engineering (formerly Mobil Technology Co) in New Jersey (USA) initiating a laboratory on energy related applications (fuel cells and membranes). She moved back to ICMAB in Barcelona, Spain in 2002. She received different awards/fellowships as a visiting scientist to the following laboratories: University of Oslo, Norway (2003), Riso National Laboratory, Denmark (2004/2005) and the Center for Advanced Science and Innovation, Japan (2006). In parallel to her duties as Group Leader at ICN2 (Spain), she is currently visiting scientist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, CH). Her research interests are the synthesis and application of nanostructured materials for Next-generation solar cells: Dye sensitized, hybrid, organic, all-oxide and perovskite solar cells. Monica Lira-Cantu has more than 85 published papers, 8 patents and 10 book chapters and 1 edited book (in preparation).

Ivan Scheblykin obtained Ph.D. in 1999 from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and Lebedev Physical Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences on exciton dynamics in J-aggregates. After a postdoctoral stay in the KU Leuven, Belgium, he moved to Sweden to start the single molecule spectroscopy group at the Division of Chemical Physics in Lund University where he became a full professor in 2014. His interests cover fundamental photophysics of organic and inorganic semiconductors and, in particular, energy transfer, charge migration and trapping. The general direction of his research is to comprehend fundamental physical and chemical processes beyond ensemble averaging in material science and chemical physics using techniques inspired by single molecule fluorescence spectroscopy and single particle imaging.

Sam Stranks is Professor of Optoelectronocs and Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Department of Chemical Engineering & Biotechnology and the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. He obtained his DPhil (PhD) from the University of Oxford in 2012. From 2012-2014, he was a Junior Research Fellow at Worcester College Oxford and from 2014-2016 a Marie Curie Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He established his research group in 2017, with a focus on the optical and electronic properties of emerging semiconductors for low-cost electronics applications.

Sam received the 2016 IUPAP Young Scientist in Semiconductor Physics Prize, the 2017 Early Career Prize from the European Physical Society, the 2018 Henry Moseley Award and Medal from the Institute of Physics, the 2019 Marlow Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry, the 2021 IEEE Stuart Wenham Award and the 2021 Philip Leverhulme Prize in Physics. Sam is also a co-founder of Swift Solar, a startup developing lightweight perovskite PV panels, and an Associate Editor at Science Advances.

Omer Yaffe is a senior scientist (assistant professor) at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

He investigates the structure-function relationship in functional materials such as semiconductors, ionic-conductors, and ferroelectrics. Specifically, he is interested in phenomena that stems from strongly anharmonic atomic displacements in solids. 

He earned his Bachelor's degrees in chemistry and chemical engineering (dual-program) at Ben Gurion University in 2005, followed by a master’s degree in chemical engineering. In 2013, he earned a Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute followed by a postdoctoral term at Columbia University, New York.