Liangjun Ji

Professional Committee Positions:

• Since 2000: Assistant Secretary of the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) Technical Committee (TC82) for Solar Photovoltaic Energy Systems, and member of Working Groups WG2/3/6/7/8/9.
• Since 2000: Member of the United States Technical Advisory Committee for IEC TC82.
• Since 2006: Chair of the Expert Task Force for Photovoltaics (ETF9) within the Committee of Testing Laboratories (CTL) of the IEC System for Conformity Testing and Certification of Electrotechnical Equipment and Components (IECEE). Assisted in incorporating photovoltaics into the IECEE certification system in 2004 and has continuously served as the convenor of the photovoltaics expert task force.
• Since 2007: Technical Assessor for IECEE peer assessment.
• Since 2009: Lead Assessor for IECEE peer assessment.
• 2016-2020: Member of the IEC Renewable Energy Testing and Certification Organization (IECRE).
• 2009-2012: Vice-Chair of the Committee on Solar Energy, Geothermal and Other Alternative Energies (E44) of ASTM.
• 2006-2022: Member of the Standardization Administration of China Technical Committee for Solar Photovoltaic Energy Systems (SAC TC90).
• 2008-2014: Member of the Standardization Administration of China Technical Committee for Fuel Cells (SAC TC342).
• Since 1992, involved in establishing Arizona State University’s photovoltaic testing laboratory, which became the world’s first commercial photovoltaic certification laboratory except national laboratories, where he signed the first international certification for Chinese photovoltaic modules (Suntech Power). 
• Leading author of the world’s first concentrate photovoltaic standards, IEEE 1513 and IEC 62108.

Martin Green

Martin Green is a Scientia Professor at UNSW well known for his work on improving silicon solar cell efficiency. He is the inventor of the PERC cell and his team was also first to conceive of and demonstrate TOPCon, with PERC and TOPCon now accounting for over 90% of worldwide production. He was recently awarded the 2021 Japan Prize, the 2022 Millennium Technology Prize and the 2023 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for this work. Professor Green also trained many of the engineers and scientists who made China the solar powerhouse it is today.

Armin Aberle

Prof Armin Aberle is the CEO/Director of the Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore (SERIS) at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Head of two of the institute’s R&D departments. He entered the PV research field in 1986 when he joined the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (Fraunhofer ISE) in Germany as a final-year thesis student, and then PhD student, to conduct fundamental investigations of surface recombination losses in crystalline silicon wafer solar cells. In 1992, he received his PhD degree in physics from the University of Freiburg with highest commendation. From 1992 to 1994, he was the recipient of a Postdoctoral Humboldt Fellowship (Feodor Lynen programme) of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany to spend two years at the PV Research Centre at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia. From 1994 to 1998, he was the Scientific Director of the newly established Silicon PV Department at the Institute for Solar Energy Research (ISFH) in Hamelin, Germany. He then returned to UNSW for 10 years as a solar energy professor, researching novel c-Si thin-film solar cells on glass. In 2008 he joined NUS in Singapore to establish SERIS, as the Deputy CEO and Director of the Silicon PV Cluster. Since 2012 he is the CEO of SERIS.

In his 38-year career in 3 continents (Europe, Australia, Asia) Prof Aberle has been a prolific researcher, educator, mentor and leader in the global solar PV community. His research covers the full spectrum from fundamental materials and device research to the industrial evaluation of novel PV technologies at the pilot line level and their transfer to industry. He was also a core member of the UNSW team that developed and taught the world’s first Bachelor of Engineering degree programme for Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering.

Prof Aberle's expertise covers crystalline silicon (c-Si) materials in wafer-based as well as thin-film based PV applications. In the 1980s and 1990s, he performed pioneering research in the area of c-Si surface passivation, including (i) the discovery that the effective surface recombination velocity Seff at thermal oxide passivated c-Si surfaces is light intensity (or injection level) dependent, (ii) the demonstration of the importance of fixed interface charges for low Seff values, (iii) the development of the concept of field effect passivation of c-Si solar cells, and (iv) the invention of the gate-enhanced solar cell. He also developed low-temperature remote-plasma silicon nitride films giving world record Seff values on silicon wafers. During 1998 to 2008 at UNSW, he invented a glass texturing method for thin-film PV modules and developed three novel c-Si thin-film solar cells on glass. 

He supervised more than 60 PhD students to successful completion of their degrees. He published more than 500 scientific-technical papers which have received more than 18,000 citations (h-index 64). He has been teaching PV related courses at universities for 30 years (NUS, UNSW, U Hannover). He won several research awards, including the PVSEC Award at the 32nd International Photovoltaic Science and Engineering Conference (PVSEC-32) in Italy in 2022 and the Hamakawa Award at the PVSEC-26 in Singapore in 2016. He is a member of the Editorial Board of scientific journals (Progress in Photovoltaics, Solar RRL), Executive Chairman of the Academic Committee of the Asian Photovoltaic Industry Association (APVIA), and member of the International Advisory Committees of PV research institutes (India, France) and the International Photovoltaic Science and Engineering Conference (PVSEC). 

Eicke Weber

Prof. Eicke Weber worked for 23 years ('83-'06) as Prof. of Materials Science at UC Berkeley, CA, USA, with a focus on semiconductor Materials Science, initially for microelectronics technology, but since about 1990 increasingly as well for photovoltaic applications. His scientific work has been published in more than 600 publications and cited more than 30,000 times is highly regarded. Some of his findings are ground-breaking with respect to understanding the role of transition metal contamination in silicon and developing innovative technologies to control these contaminants to provide the needed fundamental understanding for continuous improvement of Si solar cells.

In 2006, he left his position at UC Berkeley to accept the directorship of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE in Freiburg, Germany, continuing his research there and at the University of Freiburg. Under his guidance, Fraunhofer ISE developed from an institute with a staff of about 500 and an annual budget of Euro 25m to one of the world's leading institutes in solar energy systems research and development, with annual budget of more than Euro 70m and a total staff of more than 1200. 
This institute spun off during Weber's tenure in 2016 the company NEXWAFE. NEXWAFE is preparing to offer now alternative crystalline Si wafer substrates for PV applications, created by thin-film deposition, and thus avoiding the energy intensive crystal growth of huge Si single crystals, followed by cutting the crystal with diamond wire that results in the loss of almost half of the valuable, ultra-pure Si in the form of kerf loss.  

After reaching the mandatory retiring age in 2016, Weber accepted the position of CEO of the Berkeley Research Program BEARS in Singapore. His group there continued research in the field of photovoltaics, now focusing on tandem structures of Si solar cells with Perovskite top cells. Since mid-2017, Prof. Weber returned to Europe to serve as founding co-chair of the European Solar Manufacturing Council ESMC, and co-founder of MCPV, a start-up planning to establish multi-GW  PV cell and module production in Germany. MCPV is currently looking for the needed funds to establish a first 300MW pilot-line cell and module production, as step to the first 3GW production, but with the final goal to achieve 15 GW of PV cell and module production by 2030, based on heterojunction technology.

During his whole career Prof. Weber has actively engaged in many ways to help support local and global efforts to accelerate the transformation to renewable energy. In 2014 he convened in Freiburg a global workshop of leading scientists to discuss and evaluate the upcoming transition of the PV market into the Terawatt scale. The predictions of this workshop (Science 356, 141 ('17)) have already now been validated, in 2022 the world installed the first Terawatt of PV, as predicted by the most optimistic scenario of that workshop. The most recent Third Terawatt workshop in 2022 predicted worldwide PV installations of  75 TW by 2050 (Science 380,  6640 ('23)). 

In the Fall of 2020, Prof. Weber invited notable colleagues worldwide to form the 'Global 100%RE Strategy Group' that published in 2021 a well-received 'Joint Declaration of the 100% RE Strategy Group.' This declaration was based on scientific evidence of many detailed studies, and came to the conclusion that a worldwide energy supply based on 100% Renewable Energy is possible, it makes economic sense, and it can help substantially to fight the dangerous prospects of catastrophic climate change that we will encounter if we fail to address the enormous problems not only to reduce annual emissions of climate-damaging greenhouse gases, but as well to start working on ways to reduce the concentration of these gases in our present atmosphere.

To summarise, I would describe Prof. Weber as one of the world's most successful and influential researchers and supporters of photovoltaics. He has certainly played a major role in the worldwide success of photovoltaics.