UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Nelson Y. Zadeh, assistant professor of energy and mineral engineering in the Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, has received the 2024 Early Career Research Award from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Dzade will use the $875,000 award over five years to develop a multiscale framework to predict and understand solar cell interfaces.
Dzade is one of two Penn State faculty members selected by the DOE for an Early Career Research Award. Funding was also awarded to Lucas Mükler of the Eberly College of Science. They are among 91 early career scientists across the country awarded funding through the program. This year’s award recipients represent 50 universities and 12 DOE national laboratories across the country.
“It is an incredible honor for me to be selected for this prestigious award,” said Zadeh. “I am thrilled to be among the nation’s outstanding early-career research scientists who are tackling some of our toughest challenges and helping ensure America’s economic competitiveness for decades to come.”
Dzade said he is ready to work on a project titled “Multiscale Modeling of Heteroepitaxial Interfaces for Scalable Thin-Film Solar Cell Applications.”
Thin-film solar devices are composed of multilayer structures, whose interfacial properties and atomic-scale dynamics play an important role in the overall device performance and stability. Advances in thin-film solar cells could therefore greatly benefit from detailed atomic-level analysis, which provides insight into interfacial structure and properties that can be exploited to improve performance, Dzade said. Masu.
“Providing clean and sustainable energy is one of the most pressing challenges for society and the global economy, and it raises fundamental and provocative scientific questions,” Zadeh said. “Solar energy has long been seen as one of the key solutions in green energy production because it is extremely abundant and freely available.”
Dzade will develop and implement a multiscale modeling environment that integrates a wide range of advanced computational approaches and complementary experiments to obtain a complete microscopic picture of interfacial phenomena in solar materials. His team plans to train high-precision machine learning models to enable large-scale molecular dynamics simulations of the structure and evolution of complex interfaces in solar cells.
Given the complexity of the interface, its narrow width, and its typical location buried within the bulk material, it is difficult to resolve or access the interface by purely experimental means. According to Dzade, simulation and modeling are ideal for complementing experimentation and providing missing information. This project will not only help to identify specific bottlenecks to the performance of photovoltaic devices, but also to achieve more efficient and stable solar cells with clear socio-economic and environmental benefits. It also enables optimization based on insight into the interfacial properties of
“Given the complex nature of the interface, it’s important to look at it with different eyes,” says Zadeh. “This research is only possible in an interdisciplinary environment like Penn State, where we can collaborate with a team of interdisciplinary experimental collaborators such as the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Materials Research Institute. , we have state-of-the-art computational and experimental tools that allow us to really create collaborative back-and-forth loops of information sharing, so we can develop and validate models and understand the complete picture of interfaces. .”
Zadeh said he hopes the research will inspire a new generation of young scientists to pursue new technologies such as quantum computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning. He believes these research areas hold the key to innovation-based competitiveness and a more sustainable and equitable future.
“This award and the recent Solar District Cup win demonstrate the growing excitement about energy engineering among our students,” Zadeh said. “And we need energy engineers because they are at the forefront of the sustainable energy movement and provide critical leadership in driving green and economically viable energy solutions.” Because it is fulfilling its role.”
Dzade leads the Materials and Minerals Theory Group, which specializes in the development and application of advanced theoretical methods to elucidate the relationships between structure, properties, and performance of solid-state materials. He is program chair of the Energy Engineering Program in the John and Willie Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering and co-director of AESEDA, the Alliance for Education, Science, Engineering, and Design with Africa.
Prior to joining Penn State in 2021, he was a Research Innovation Fellow at the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and an Independent Group Leader in the Department of Chemistry at Cardiff University. He was also a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands.
Dzade holds a Bachelor of Science in Applied Statistics from the Tamale Development University in Ghana, a Master of Science in Materials Science and a Postgraduate Degree in Materials Science from the African University of Science and Technology in Abuja, Nigeria. He received his PhD from the Jawaharlal Nehru Center for Advanced Science Research in Bangalore, India, and his PhD in Computational Materials Science from University College London, UK. The goal of DOE’s Early Career Research Program is to strengthen the nation’s scientific workforce by supporting outstanding researchers early in their careers. Since its inception in 2010, the program has awarded 961 awards, including 631 to university researchers and 330 to national laboratory researchers.
