Solar Energy Conversion

2010-2014

Sponsor

Research Corporation for Science Advancement

Additional Support

National Science Foundation 
Colorado Renewable Energy Collaboratory  

Theme

Meeting the world’s need for clean, renewable energy will require new, high-performing materials with greater stability, lower cost and higher efficiency than materials currently used in solar energy devices. It will also require innovation in methods for solar energy conversion to electricity.

Scialog: Solar Energy Conversion brought together newly tenured professors doing high-risk, high-reward solar-energy research, as well as top national authorities in photovoltaics and solar fuel, to help accelerate the pace of innovation and catalyze ideas with the potential to advance the fundamental scientific understanding of solar energy conversion to electricity or fuels.

The conferences aimed to build a creative cross-disciplinary community to identify and analyze bottlenecks in achieving more efficient and durable solar energy conversion and develop approaches for transformative breakthroughs.

Scialog: Solar Energy Conversion was the pilot for the Scialog program, with different participants and a slightly different structure from subsequent initiatives. Scialog: Solar Energy Conversion awards were made to 30 Fellows who wrote research proposals in advance of the meetings. These awardees were further along in their careers than today’s Scialog Fellows, and the 50+ conference participants included other researchers who had been awarded National Science Foundation grants to pursue solar energy research. Then as now, conference participants formed teams to write proposals for cutting-edge collaborative research. In total, 17 of these proposals were funded.