[so far confirmed / in alphabetical order]
Prof. Chihaya ADACHI
Kyushu University, Japan
Title (Tentative): Organic Thermoelectric Device Utilizing Charge Transfer Interface
More InformationProf. Chihaya Adachi obtained his doctorate in Materials Science and Technology in 1991 from Kyushu University. He held positions as a research chemist and physicist in the Chemical Products R&D Center at Ricoh Co., a research associate at Shinshu University, a research staff at Princeton University, and an associate professor and professor at Chitose Institute of Science and Technology. In 2005, he returned to Kyushu University as a professor and was promoted to a distinguished professor in 2010, and his current posts also include director of Kyushu University’s Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics Research (OPERA) since 2010 and director of the Fukuoka i3 Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics Research since 2013. His research has been concentrated on organic synthesis, device fabrication, and optical and electrical device characterization of organic semiconductors. He has been serving as an editor of “Organic Electronics” (Elsevier) (2007-2019) and CCS Chemistry (2019-). His publications include over 670 research papers. He won Nishina Memorial Award (2017), Nagoya Silver Medal (2019), etc., and was selected as a highly cited researcher (Clarivate) (2018-2023). In 2023, he was awarded the Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon.
Prof. Guillermo C. BAZAN
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Title (Tentative): Conjugated Oligoelectrolytes: A Versatile Platform for Membrane Modifications
More InformationProfessor Guillermo (Gui) Bazan received his B.Sc. (summa cum laude) from the University of Ottawa. His Ph.D. studies were carried out at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the guidance of Nobel Laurate Richard R. Schrock. He was a postdoctoral associate at the California Institute of Technology with Professor John E. Bercaw.
Professor Bazan began his independent academic career at the University of Rochester in 1992. He was recruited by the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1998 by Nobel Laurate Alan Heeger, where he held appointments in the Departments of Materials and in Chemistry & Biochemistry. Gui moved to the National University of Singapore in 2020, where he remains Provost Professor and holds appointments in the Departments of Chemistry, Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering and Pharmacology. In 2024, Gui assumed Director of the Institute of Digital Molecular Analytics at the Nanyang Technological University. Relevant awards and recognitions include: Thomson Reuter “Most Influential Scientific Minds”, 2015; Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, 2014; Top 50 Material Scientists by Citation and Impact, Thompson Reuters, 2011; Macromolecules Advisory Board, 2009; Professor of the Chang Jiang Scholars Professor, 2009; Advanced Materials Editorial Advisory Board, 2008; Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2007; American Chemical Society Cope Scholar Award, 2006; Bessel Award, Humboldt Foundation, 2005; NSF Special Creativity Award, 2003; Union Carbide Innovation Award, 1999; Union Carbide Innovation Award, 1998; Closs Lecturer, University of Chicago, 1997; Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, 1996-1998; Sloan Research Fellow Award, 1996-1998; NSF CAREER Award, 1995-1998; Dreyfus New Faculty Award, 1992-1993; NSERCC Postdoctoral Fellowship, November 1990-May 1992 and the NSERCC 1967 Science and Engineering Scholarship, September 1986-June 1990.
Five spin-off companies are associated with his laboratories and the sudents in his group. They include Sirigen (purchased by Becton Dickinson), NEXT Energy, and Apeel Technologies in California. Xiretsa has a home in California and Singapore, while Acorela is a Singapore-based company. Prof. Bazan holds approximately sixty patents. Forty-five of his previous students and postdoctoral associates now lead successful academic positions.
Prof. Hongzheng CHEN
Zhejiang University, China
Title (Tentative): Towards High Performance Organic and Perovskite Solar Cells
More InformationHongzheng Chen is currently a Distinguished Professor at Department of Polymer Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University (ZJU), China. She completed undergraduate study from ZJU in 1988. She joined ZJU after obtaining her Ph.D. degree in Polymer Chemistry at the same university in 1994, and became a Full Professor in 1999. She once visited Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, University of Antwerpen and Interuniversity MicroElectronic Center of Belgium, and Stanford University. Her research interest focuses on the development of organic and organic/inorganic hybrid materials for optoelectronic applications, including solar cells and photodetectors. She published over 500 refereed papers in journals including Nature Nanotechnology, JACS, Adv. Mater., Nature Commun., Joule, etc., and was selected as the highly cited researchers by Clarivate in 2022 and 2023. She is now served as Associate Editor of ACS Applied Polymer Materials.
Prof. Chunyan CHI
National University of Singapore, Singapore
Title (Tentative): Molecular Carbons with Different Shapes and Sizes: Synthesis, Electronic Properties, and Applications
More InformationChunyan Chi received her PhD degree from the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (Supervisor: Prof. Gerhard Wegner) in 2004. After that, she conducted her postdoctoral work with Professor Guillermo Bazan at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is now a tenured associate professor in the Department of Chemistry at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Her research interests include the synthesis of extended π-electron systems with novel structures, aromaticity, organic diradicaloids, dyes, liquid crystals, and functional materials for organic electronics. She has received Asian Core Program Lectureship Awards from Japan (2013), China (2014), Taiwan (2014), Hong Kong (2019), and South Korea (2023); the Young Chemist Award from the Department of Chemistry at NUS in 2016; the Distinguished Lectureship Award from the Chemical Society of Japan in 2017; the Faculty Teaching Excellence Award at NUS in 2023; and the SNIC-AsCA2019 Distinguished Woman Chemist Award in 2024. She is an associate editor or an advisory board member of several reputable journals, including the Journal of Materials Chemistry C, Materials Advances, Chemistry - A European Journal, Organic Letters, Organic Materials, the Journal of Physical Organic Chemistry, and Synthetic Metals.
Prof. Paulette CLANCY
Johns Hopkins University, USA
Title (Tentative): Progress and Challenges in Computational Materials Discovery and Design
More InformationPaulette Clancy is the Edward J. Schaefer Professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Johns Hopkins University. She is the inaugural research director for Hopkins’ Data Science and AI Institute. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and of AIChE. Since 2019, she has also served as the Chair of Hopkins Research Computing Committee, the faculty oversight committee for high-performance computing at JHU. Prior to this, she spent over 30 years at Cornell, serving as the Samuel and Diane Bodman Professor of ChE before moving to Johns Hopkins in 2018 to become the inaugural department Head of ChE from 2018-2023. Clancy leads one of the top groups in the country studying atomic- and molecular-scale modeling and simulation of semiconductor materials. Over the past decade her work has turned strongly into algorithm development in machine learning, especially Bayesian optimization.
Prof. Simone FABIANO
Linköping University, Sweden
Title (Tentative): Chemical and Electrochemical Doping of Organic Semiconductors: Challenges and Opportunities
More InformationSimone Fabiano is an associate professor of organic electronics, a docent in Applied Physics, and the head of the Organic Nanoelectronics group at the Department of Science and Technology at Linköping University. He obtained his PhD in Chemistry from the University of Palermo (Italy) in 2012. During his doctoral studies, he was a visiting scholar at the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials at the University of Groningen (Netherlands). He then held postdoctoral positions at Linköping University (2012-2015) and Northwestern University (2016-2017) before returning to Linköping University to establish his independent research group. In 2020, he founded n-Ink AB, a startup focused on developing n-type organic conductive inks, where he serves as Chief Scientific Officer and board member. His research group at Linköping University primarily focuses on developing novel doping strategies and organic mixed ionic-electronic conductors for printed electronics and neuromorphic hardware applications. He has received several awards, including the VR Starting Grant (2017) and Consolidator Grant (2023), the Wallenberg Academy Fellow Award (2021), and the ERC Consolidator Grant (2023). Since 2023, he has also served on the editorial board of Materials Horizons.
Prof. Jianhui HOU
Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ICCAS), China
Title (Tentative): Material Design and Device Engineering for Efficient Organic Photovoltaic Cells
More InformationJianhui Hou, PhD, Professor, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ICCAS). In 2006, he got his PhD degree at ICCAS; during 2006-2008, worked at UCLA as the postdoctoral researcher; during 2008-2010, served as the Director of Research at Solarmer Energy Inc. At the end of 2010, he joined ICCAS and built a research team. Dr. Hou focuses on the research of organic photovoltaics, and three of his major interests includes: (a) to design and synthesize new conjugated polymers and small molecules for the applications in efficient organic photovoltaic cells; (b) to improve photovoltaic performance of organic photovoltaic cells by device engineering; (c) to develop fabrication process of large area and flexible organic photovoltaic cells.
Dr. Hou has co-authored 400+ papers in the peer-reviewed journals with a H-index of 123 and published 20+ patents. Now, he also serves as the associate editor of Chinese Journal of Chemistry and the editorial board member of a few peer-reviewed journals. For more information, please visit the websites of http://houjianhui.iccas.ac.cn/ and https://www.webofscience.com/wos/author/record/E-5824-2011
Prof. Seth MARDER
University of Colorado Boulder, USA
Title (Tentative): Chiral Optical and Optoelectronic Materials
More InformationSeth Marder is the Director of the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute, which is joint between the University of Colorado-Boulder (CU-Boulder) and the NREL. He is also a professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering Chemistry, and a Fellow of the Materials Science and Engineering Program at CU-Boulder and a Senior Research Fellow at NREL.
He previously held positions at Caltech and JPL, University of Arizona, and the Georgia Institute of Technology (where he was a Regent’s Professor and the Georgia Power Chair in Energy Efficiency). Marder has held advisory positions for several companies and universities. He also served on advisory and review committees for the National Science Foundation and Department of Energy. In addition, he was appointed by Secretary of Commerce to it Emerging Technology and Research Advisory Committee that provided Recommendations on export control issues. Marder has formed and led numerous research centers over the years, bringing together diverse teams of researcher to addresses multidisciplinary scientific and societal challenges. He currently serves of the Science and Technology Advisory Board for the Alliance for Sustainable Energy LLC that oversees NREL.
He has published over 600 peer reviewed papers with an H-index = 129 and over 80,000 citations (Google Scholar), has 40 issued patents and co-founded two successful start-up companies. He has edited several proceedings and books including two a volume set with Jean-Luc Bredas entitled The World Scientific Publishing Company Reference on Organic Electronics: Organic Semiconductors. He was helped to create and was the founding Chair of the Editorial Board for the Royal Society of Chemistry’s premier journal Materials Horizons.
A lifelong advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion, he chose a founding editorial board for Materials Horizon that had excellent gender representation of women, which at the time (sadly) was not the norm. Marder also served on the Board of Directors of GEM https://www.gemfellowship.org/gem-fellowship-program/ an organization that focuses on providing graduate fellowships for under-represented students. More recently Marder was a co-chair of a CU-Boulder/UN Human Right co-hosted 2022 Right Here Right Now Summit https://www.colorado.edu/globalclimatesummit/ that focused on climate change as a human rights issue and worked to ensure that there was diverse representation of the speakers and panelist in terms of geography, age, gender and ethnicity.
Among his recognitions and awards, Dr. Marder was a recipient of an NSF Special Creativity Award, the ACS Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, Georgia Tech Outstanding Faculty Research Author, and its Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award (Georgia Tech’s highest award for any faculty member), the MRS Mid-Career Award, and a Humboldt Research Award. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Optical Society of America, SPIE, the Royal Society of Chemistry the American Physical Society, the Materials Research Society, and the National Academy of Inventors and a Member of the World Cultural Council.