Virginia Lafranconi

holds a Bachelor's degree (2021) in Chemistry from the Università degli Studi di Milano, during which she had the opportunity to study in Sweden as an Erasmus exchange student at Uppsala University, where she became interested in energy and the environment. For her bachelor thesis, she researched porphyrin-based dye-sensitised solar cells. With her commitment to innovation and a greener future, she completed her Master's degree in Low Carbon Technologies and Sustainable Chemistry at the University of Bologna (2023), during which she gained practical experience in photovoltaics and completed an internship at the IMS Institute in Bordeaux in the group of Prof. Guillaume Wantz. Guillaume Wantz.
There she worked on the synthesis of organic solar cells, in which chlorinated solvents are replaced by aqueous dispersions of polymer nanoparticles, and investigated the thermal stability of polymer-based layers for the production of solar cells for hybrid applications.
In January 2024, she moved to Graz to continue her PhD within the MSCA-DN programme OPVStability, which aims to develop innovative stabilisation tools for interfacial and bulk heterojunction morphology in OPV and is mainly carried out at Graz University of Technology under the supervision of Gregor Trimmel.

 

Manan Mehta

holds a Master of Research degree (2022) in Soft Electronic Materials from Imperial College London. He worked with Dr Piers Barnes on Perovskite based Memristors, Transistors and Memtransistors, and showed that ionic screening is responsible for poor gate modulation in perovskite transistors using simulations and demonstrated the first instance of gate-modulated filamentary resistive switching behaviour in perovskite memristive devices using experimental methods, and subsequently winning the Outstanding Achievement Award for Core Course on the MRes Soft Electronic Materials Course. In February 2024, he started his PhD under the supervision of Mariano Campoy-Quiles co-supervised by Sergi Riera-Lorente within the MSCA-DN programme, OPVStability, which aims to use high-throughput screening of organic materials for screening for power conversion efficiency and stability, evaluation of novel systems and processing parameter space, and study of large datasets that will be employed to feed statistical tools and artificial intelligence models.