New organic materials for creating advanced, flexible, light-weight solar cells and electronics for military and civilian use in remote areas away from power grids will be the focus of a new research center directed by Enrique Gomez, professor of chemical engineering and materials science and engineering at Penn State.
The Center for Self-Assembled Organic Electronics (SOE) will be funded by a $7.5 million, five-year, Multidisciplinary University Research Initiatives grant from the Office of Naval Research.
The SOE Center co-director is Alberto Salleo, professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford University. Other faculty in the SOE Center include Scott Milner, the William H. Joyce Chair Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Penn State; John Asbury, associate professor of chemistry at Penn State; Zhenan Bao, professor of chemical engineering at Stanford University; Michael Toney, distinguished staff scientist at Stanford University’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory; Giulia Galli, professor of chemistry at the University of Chicago; Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Iowa State; and Iain McCulloch, professor of polymer materials at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia and chair in polymer materials at Imperial College London.