Transcript of video profile of Matthew Crane, Ph.D., Washington Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the University of Washington’s Department of Chemistry. Minor editing has taken place to improve clarity.
As a Washington Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, I’ve been developing new materials that can boost the power conversion efficiency of solar cells. These materials can make standard solar cells that you put on the roof of your house up to 20% more efficient, really just increasing the amount of power that they can produce, which is a huge advantage for both increasing the deployment of solar over time by just dropping the cost, but also—and what’s really more important to me—is the environmental impact of just reducing carbon emissions, starting in the U.S., but hopefully really worldwide.
The advantage of our technology is that it’s not limited in any capacity, and that by focusing on manufacturing methods that this is something that can be scalable and can be produced at a really large scale to impact global energy systems rather than just being focused on one little problem.
And so, we thought that maybe we should commercialize it, and so we took the technology … we started thinking about this, we came, honestly to the WRF and they gave us a lot of really good advice about the steps to take.
Overall, the Washington Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship gave me the time to think about a really big picture problem, and along that pathway find a really fascinating material, and they gave me the space to dig down into that very particular problem.
And having the time and the runway to focus on all of the individual problems associated with this new fascinating material is really what has brought it to fruition and helped me take the time to talk to a customer, iterate in the lab and make a technology something that is as close as I’ve ever brought to the real world and that hopefully will become real and sold in panels within the next two or three years.