Professor Jan Schmidt

"Green technologies will form the basis of our future global society. The enhancement of known technologies as well as novel approaches for the effective reduction of carbon dioxide emissions, for the reduction of environmentally harmful pollutants as well as sustainable production of goods are at the core of this. The Green Talents Award honours the smartest and most creative minds to tackle the greatest challenge of our time: the transformation into a fully sustainable global society."

Head of Department at Institute for Solar Energy Research Hamelin (ISFH)

Prof. Jan Schmidt is head of the Photovoltaics Department at the Institute for Solar Energy Research Hamelin (ISFH) and Professor of Photovoltaic Materials Research at the Institute of Solid-State Physics at the Leibniz University Hannover.

The research interests of Jan Schmidt include the development of novel solar cell concepts and fabrication processes, with focus on surface passivation schemes and selective contacts, the development of novel characterisation techniques for semiconductor materials and solar cells, and the analysis and manipulation of defects in semiconductors. He is the inventor of several patents, some of which have been licensed to industry.

Jan Schmidt is scientific committee member for several international conferences and Editor of the IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics. He is also co-initiator and organiser of the annual graduate workshop “SiliconForest” (“Progress in the development of solar cell structures and technologies”) and co-initiator and member of the organisation committee of the annual nPV Workshop on n-type silicon-based photovoltaics.

Jan Schmidt studied Physics. In 1998, he finished his PhD at Leibniz University Hannover. Before he joined ISFH in 2001 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Physical Electronics (IPE) at the University of Stuttgart and Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow (Feodor-Lynen program) at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra.