Ellen Moons, professor in Materials Physics at Karlstad University, Sweden since 2011, is interested in the self-organisation of molecules in thin films for applications in organic optoelectronics, such as solar cells and light-emitting diodes (LEDs).
Her prime research focus is on the formation of phase-separated domain structures in thin films containing conjugated polymers and molecules, such as fullerene derivatives, as they are coated from solution. Microscopy and spectroscopy studies carried out in her research group have resulted in contributions to the understanding of how the morphology of such thin films is formed and how that impacts on the solar cell performance.
Atomic force microscopy has been one of the main tools she has used to characterise the nanosized structures formed in spin-coated thin films of polymer blends. The capabilities of AFM-IR to chemically identify the components in the blend by their infrared vibrational fingerprints, and study their distribution in the thin film with nano-scale resolution, has added an important dimension to the morphology studies of these intermixed molecular layers.
Biography: Ellen gained a PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel and her post-doc research was related to dye-sensitized solar cells at EPFL Lausanne and TU Delft. She was previously a Research Scientist at Cambridge Display Technology and a Research Assistant at the University of Cambridge. Since 2011, she has been at Karlstad University in Sweden as Professor of Materials Physics.
Twitter: @ellen_moons