People
Graduate Students
Kevin Arpin
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Kevin Arpin is a graduate student in Prof. Braun's Group working on functional multidimensional metallic architectures with micrometer to nanometer scale feature sizes for applications including solar energy harvesting, energy storage, and metamaterials.
Nicolas Batara
California Institute of Technology
Nicolas Batara is a graduate student in the Lewis research group at Caltech. His research focuses on plasmonic nanolithography for direct material structuring. Currently he is working on optical simulations of SeTe thin-film deposition under illumination.
Joseph Beardslee
California Institute of Technology
Joseph Beardslee is a graduate student in the Lewis group at Caltech. He is working on the directed assembly of inorganic microstructures into organic matrices.
Noah Bronstein
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Noah Bronstein is a graduate student in the Alivisatos Group at UC Berkeley. He is developing a new nanoparticle solar cell design in collaboration with Professor Yablonovitch. Additionally, he is collaborating with Derek Le and Lanfang Li (Nuzzo Group) on photoluminescent concentrator solar cells.
Ana Brown
California Institute of Technology
Ana Brown is a graduate student in the Atwater research group at Caltech. She studies novel methods of optical power harvesting by exploiting the plasmonic resonances of nanoscale conductors. Her interests also include light trapping in thin film solar cells.
Eric Brueckner
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Eric Brueckner is a graduate student in Prof. Nuzzo's group working on micro-scale, single-crystal silicon solar cells for flexible and semi-transparent photovoltaic applications. These micro-scale devices can be flexed to very small radius of curvature making them amenable to form factors not achievable with traditional photovoltaic modules.
Dennis Callahan
California Institute of Technology
Dennis Callahan is a graduate student in the Atwater group who works on design and fabrication of novel solar cells in which the electromagnetic environment has been intentionally engineered to enhance performance. In particular, solar cells in which the local density of optical states (LDOS) is not homogeneous. This includes solar cells incorporating elements of plasmonics, photonic crystals, optical resonators and other nanophotonic elements.
Chris Corcoran
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Chris Corcoran is a graduate student in the Nuzzo group focusing on studying thin-film, single crystal silicon photovoltaics. Currently he is studying light-matter interactions involving plasmonic surfaces.
Carissa Eisler
California Institute of Technology
Carissa Nicole Eisler is a graduate student in the Atwater group at Caltech. She is currently researching passivation schemes for carrier recombination sites in small (≤ mm2), high efficiency GaAs cells, as well as other III-V compound cells. She has been investigating simple chemical treatments that can passivate exposed edges, making both small cells and larger cells that are damaged improve in performance and durability.
Cris Flowers
California Institute of Technology
Cris Flowers is a graduate student in the Atwater research group at Caltech. He studies electrical and thermal architecture for novel spectral splitting approaches to photovoltaic energy conversion.
Vidya Ganapti
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Vidya Ganapati is a graduate student in the Yablonovitch Group at UC Berkeley, designing light trapping structures for solar cells through computational optimization.
Chris Gladden
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Chris Gladden works in Xiang Zhang's lab in UC Berkeley. He is currently involved in the theory, design and fabrication of transformation optics materials for photovoltaic applications.
Matt Goodman
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Matt Goodman is a graduate student in Prof. Paul Braun's Group at the University of Illinois. He is working on a number of projects including orthogonal approaches to three-dimensional nanostructures and unique colloidal opal fabrication and characterization.
Sidhartha Gupta
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Sidhartha Gupta is a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Materials Science & Engineering, and is co-advised by Profs. Paul V. Braun (MatSE, Illinois) and Pierre Wiltzius (MLPS, UCSB). His research focuses on the proximity field nano-patterning, and its application to fabricate novel and functional structures for applications in photonics and metamaterials.
Min Seok Jang
California Institute of Technology
Min Seok Jang is a graduate student in Prof. Atwater's Group working on plasmonic slow light devices and mid-infrared graphene plasmonics for applications in optical information processing and matamaterials.
Emily Kosten
California Institute of Technology
Emily Kosten is a graduate student in the Atwater group at Caltech. Her research interests include optics and the thermodynamic limits to solar cell efficiency. More specifically, she is interested in managing photon entropy in solar cells for improved efficiency. She has also worked on optical modeling of silicon microwire arrays.
Neil Krueger
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Neil Krueger is a grad student in the Braun Group at UIUC working on optical materials. He earned his B.S. Engineering Physics from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, where he performed research simulating 3D Gaussian vector beam propagation and optical nonlinearities.
Lanfang Li
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Lanfang Li is a graduate student in the Nuzzo Group at Illinois working on developing light trapping structures and wavelength down conversion for photovoltaic application.
David Lorang
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
David Lorang is a graduate student in the Lewis group at UIUC and works on novel printing methods for polymeric optical materials, targeting waveguide and lens structures.
Matt Lucas
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Matt Lucas is a Mechanical Engineering graduate student in the Alivisatos group at UC Berkeley. His research includes developing earth-abundant semiconductor absorber layers and quantum dot-based devices.
Hailong Ning
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Bibek Parajuli
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Raymond Weitekamp
California Institute of Technology
Raymond Weitekamp is a graduate student in the Grubbs & Atwater labs at Caltech, working on polymer optoelectronic devices & whispering gallery mode solar cells. He was recently awarded a Resnick-Goldhirsh Fellowship for his design of novel polymer solar cells
Yuan Yao
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Yuan Yao is a graduate student in the Nuzzo group working on 3-D integration of flexible photovoltaics based on silicon.
