Excitonic Frontiers – POSTPONED

Professor Paul Burn, University of Queensland, Australia

Professor Burn is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and Royal Society of Chemistry. He is a Professor of Chemistry, Head of the Centre for Organic Photonics & Electronics, and holds an UQ Laureate Fellowship at The University of Queensland, Australia. He received his PhD from the University of Sydney before moving to Cambridge University during which he held the Dow Research Fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge, England. In 1992 he moved to the University of Oxford and then in 2007 to The University of Queensland as an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow. His research focuses on the development of organic (opto)electronic materials and their application in technologies such as thin film photovoltaic devices and photodiodes, organic light-emitting diodes for displays and lighting, and sensors. He co-founded Cambridge Display Technology Ltd and Arborescent 2 Ltd, and developed the key technology for the Oxford University spin-out company, Opsys Ltd.

Professor Felix N. Castellano, North Carolina State University, USA

Felix (Phil) Castellano earned a B.A. in Chemistry from Clark University in 1991 and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Johns Hopkins University in 1996. Following an NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Maryland, School of Medicine, he accepted a position as Assistant Professor at Bowling Green State University in 1998. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2004, to Professor in 2006, and was appointed Director of the Center for Photochemical Sciences in 2011. In 2013, he moved his research program to North Carolina State University where he is currently the Goodnight Innovation Distinguished Chair. He was appointed as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) in 2015, earned the I-APS Award in Photochemistry in 2019, and was elected as an AAAS Fellow in 2020. He is also the inaugural Editor-in-Chief of Chemical Physics Reviews, a peer-reviewed journal from AIPP. His current research focuses on metal-organic chromophore photophysics and energy transfer, photochemical upconversion phenomena, thermally-activated delayed photoluminescence processes, solar fuels photocatalysis, energy transduction at semiconductor/molecular interfaces, photoredox catalysis, fuel-forming chemical reactions, ultrafast transient bond-making and bond-breaking processes, and excited state electron transfer.

Professor Koen Vandewal, Hasselt University, Belgium

Professor Dr Koen Vandewal obtained his PhD in Physics at Hasselt University in 2009 on the physics of organic photovoltaics. After that, he has been working for two years as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Linkoping University in Sweden and another two years at Stanford University in the USA. From 2014 – 2018, he held an endowed professor position at the Technische Universitaet Dresden in Germany. In 2018, he took up a professor position at Hasselt University, where his is leading a research group which aims to solve fundamental questions in the field of organic and molecular electronics with relevance to applications in opto-electronic devices such as organic light-emitting diodes, organic solar cells and sensors. In the organic electronics community he is best known for his seminal work on charge-transfer states at organic interfaces and their role in photovoltaic devices.

Professor Alexandra Olaya-Castro, University College London (UCL), UK

 Alexandra Olaya-Castro earned a DPhil in Physics from the University of Oxford in 2006 and subsequently obtained a Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College, University of Oxford. In 2008 she moved to University College London with an EPSRC Career Acceleration Fellowship. She became a Lecturer in 2011, was promoted to Reader in 2015 and became a Professor of Physics in 2018. Her research interests are focused on theoretical approaches to bridge quantum science and biophysics. She is a leading expert in the area of quantum effects in biomolecules and her theoretical contributions to this field made her the recipient of the 2016 Maxwell Medal and Prize by the Institute of Physics in London.

Professor A William Rutherford FRS, Imperial College London, UK

Bill Rutherford uses physico-chemical methods to understand photosynthesis. He has particular interests in the bioenergetics and evolution of photosynthetic electron transfer and water oxidation. Having studied biochemistry at the University of Liverpool, his PhD at UCL involved biophysics of bacterial photosynthesis. As a post doc at the University of Illinois, he moved into oxygenic photosynthesis, discovering the excited triplet state of chlorophyll formed by radical-pair recombination. This state causes photo-oxidative stress that can limit plant growth, bleach coral, etc. As a post doc in Riken, Japan, he determined the origin of thermoluminescence in oxygenic photosynthesis, establishing it as research method. His work was central in establishing the common evolutionary origins of all the photosynthetic reaction centres. He was a CNRS researcher in Saclay, near Paris, before moving to Imperial College London in 2011, where he holds the Chair of Biochemistry of Solar Energy.

Professor Sandy Ruhman, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Professor Sandrine Heutz, Imperial College London, UK

Sandrine Heutz is a Professor of Functional Molecular Materials at Imperial College London. She did her undergraduate degree at the University of Liege (Belgium) and Sherbrooke (Canada), and obtained her PhD in Chemistry from Imperial College London in 2002.  Following a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship at University College London on molecular magnetic biosensors she returned to Imperial for a Lectureship in the Materials Department. She leads SPIN-Lab, a multiuser Facility that investigates the interaction of electronic spins and photons and is the co-director of the London Centre for Nanotechnology.  Her current research is focused on the growth and characterisation of molecular thin films, with particular emphasis on understanding the relationship between molecular structure and optoelectronic and spintronic properties.  

Professor Jenny Nelson FRS, Imperial College London, UK

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 and hybrid semiconductor materials and their application to solar energy conversion. She also works with the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial to explore the mitigation potential of renewable energy technologies. She is an ISI Highly Cited Researcher in Materials Science and has published over 250 articles and a book on the physics of solar cells. She was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2014.

Professor Garry Rumbles, The National Renewable Energy Laboratory and University of Colorado Boulder, USA

Garry Rumbles is a Senior Research Fellow in the Chemistry and Nanoscience Center at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Colorado, USA. He received his BSc in Chemistry with Electronics from the University of Southampton, UK in 1980. He spent 3 years in the Davy Faraday Research Laboratory of the Royal Institution, obtaining his PhD on the photophysics of synthetic polymers from the University of London in 1984. He spent over 3 years in the USA as a post-doctoral researcher first at the University of Arizona, and then the University of California, Irvine. He returned to the UK in 1987 and after a brief period as a research associate at the Royal Institution, he joined the chemistry department faculty at Imperial College London. He departed Imperial College in 2001 as a Reader moving to NREL as a Scientist in the Center for Basic Science and subsequently rising to his current position of Senior Research Fellow. He remains a visiting professor of Imperial College, and is also a professor adjoint in the department of chemistry at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the Associate Director of Research for the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute, a joint institute of CU-Boulder and NREL. He is an associate editor of the RSC journal ‘Sustainable Energy and Fuels’. His current research interests are in the study of photo-induced electron transfer processes in molecular materials and the development of transient microwave conductivity. He has published over 220 journal articles, has over 13000 Google Scholar citations and an h-index of 64. He is the principal investigator of a $4M research program in solar photochemistry at NREL that is funded by the US Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences.

Professor Martin Heeney, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia

Martin Heeney is a Professor of Chemical Science at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). He is a graduate of the University of East Anglia and received his PhD from the same institution in 1999 under the supervision of Prof. Michael Cook. Following eight years in industry, he joined the Materials Department at Queen Mary University of London as a senior lecturer in 2007 before moving to Imperial College in 2009 and KAUST in 2022. His research interests include the design, synthesis and characterisation of solution processed materials for a variety of applications. He has published over 300 research papers, 5 book chapters and over 100 patents. He has been named five times by Thomson Reuters as a HighlyCited researcher in the field of Materials Science, is a recipient of the RSC Corday-Morgan (2013) medal, the RSC Peter Day (2020) award and the Macro group UK medal (2020).