First year graduate student in the Snaith and Noel groups working primarily on narrow-bandgap lead-tin solar cells.
Why solar cells? We are in a climate crisis, with a major contributor to this collapse being the burning of fossil fuels, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Energy from the sun is free and abundant - we should make the most of it!
Why narrow-bandgap? We can combine these narrow-bandgap solar cells in a stack with wider bandgap solar cells. These structures are called tandem devices. Tandem devices are a way of harvesting even more energy from the sun, meaning we can really utilise all the area we have to put solar panels.
My work focuses on trying to understand the chemistry and physics of these solar cell materials, so that we can make better solar cells, more reliably, that last as long as we need them to.