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

Maria Antonietta Loi studied physics at the University of Cagliari in Italy where she received the PhD in 2001. In the same year she joined the Linz Institute for Organic Solar cells, of the University of Linz, Austria as a post doctoral fellow. Later she worked as researcher at the Institute for Nanostructured Materials of the Italian National Research Council in Bologna Italy. In 2006 she became assistant professor and Rosalind Franklin Fellow at the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials of the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. She is now full professor in the same institution and chair of the Photophysics and OptoElectronics group. She has published more than 130 peer review articles in photophysics and optoelectronics of nanomaterials. In 2012 she has received an ERC starting grant.

Wolfgang Tress is currently working as a scientist at LPI, EPFL in Switzerland, with general interests in developing and studying novel photovoltaic concepts and technologies. His research focuses on the device physics of perovskite solar cells; most recently, investigating recombination and hysteresis phenomena in this emerging material system. Previously, he was analyzing and modeling performance limiting processes in organic solar cells.