Exploring new materials for solar power

Your research looks at new materials to enable renewable energy such as solar power — what inspired you to get into this field?

I was born in Boston but I grew up in Doolin in Co Clare, and I really appreciated the Burren and beauty of all the nature around me there. I wanted to make sure I was doing something to preserve that, and because I was interested in technology, renewable energy seemed like a good fit for me where I could do something to help address challenges like climate change.

What was your path to working with new materials?

I went to the US and studied physics at college, thinking I was going to be an engineer. Then I did a Master’s degree programme at University College Dublin called material science and engineering. That’s where I learned about material science, and I was fascinated by it. So I moved to Cambridge to look at a new class of materials called metal halide perovskites, which were generating a lot of excitement at the time for solar power applications.

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And what is a metal halide perovskite?

Metal halide perovskites are a new class of semiconductors. They’re very different to traditional semiconductors such as silicon in that they’re easy and energy-efficient to make, they tolerate defects well and you can even make them as inks that self-assemble into high-performing semiconductor films. There is a lot of interest in how perovskites might be useful in applications that silicon and other traditional semiconductors aren’t suitable for, but there are issues with their performance and stability and that’s where people are carrying out research to improve those aspects.

Presumably, this is where you come in — what did your PhD explore?

I used electron microscopes to look at metal halide perovskites at the nanoscale, trying to figure out where stability issues and performance losses are coming from. I finished up my PhD last year and now I’m continuing the work as a research fellow in Cambridge.

You now have a Schmidt Fellowship to continue the work in a new way — tell us more.

The Schmidt Fellowships are designed to train early-career scientists in interdisciplinary research. The idea is that you do something different from your PhD, with the view that in the longer term this will let you tackle bigger problems. I will start mine in October and I want to look at how innovations in artificial intelligence and data science can improve how we analyse the properties of new materials.

Using the electron microscope to look at new materials you can generate terabytes of data per day, which is a staggering amount of information. Some of the experiments I did in my PhD took two years to analyse, there was so much data. Having new ways to get through the data bottleneck could help us to address challenges around renewable energy and climate change more generally.

What drives you forward with your research?

I have always been pretty committed to the idea that if you are privileged enough to be in a position to do something about climate change or address big problems in the world you should take the opportunity to do it.

And how do you take a break to refresh your mind?

I like being outdoors as much as I can. I did a lot of rowing in college and I still coach it. Then from my family I have a love of music, so going to live concerts is a big part of my life.