OSA/CIPS Brown Bag Seminar Series

Thursday, October 9, 2008

12 noon , RLE Haus Conference Room 36-428

Towards a Low-Cost, High-Performance Solar Cell: An Overview of Photovoltaics Research in Industry and Academia

Tonio Buonassisi

Biography

Tonio Buonassisi, assistant professor of Mechanical Engineering, heads an interdisciplinary laboratory focused on photovoltaics (solar energy conversion into electricity). Prof. Buonassisi completed his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley, with research at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems and the Max-Planck-Institute for Microstructure Physics. Following his Ph.D., Prof. Buonassisi became a crystal growth scientist at Evergreen Solar, Inc., where he spearheaded efforts to improve solar cell efficiency and yield. He heads the Laboratory for Photovoltaics Research whose mission is to accelerate the adoption of renewable energy technologies, and photovoltaics in particular, via breakthroughs in efficiency, cost reduction, de-bottlenecking, and efficient materials utilization. We synthesize and characterize commercial and next-generation photovoltaic materials and devices, engineering low-cost, naturally abundant, and manufacturable materials into defect-tolerant, high-efficiency devices.