In autumn 2015 Natalie Banerji will start as an Associate Professor in Fribourg
Dr. Natalie Banerji will start as an Associate Professor at the University of Fribourg in September 2015. Until then she is funded by a CHF 1.6 million Stipend Professorship grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Her project is entitled “A Mechanistic Approach to Organic Electronics”.
The global objective is to understand fundamental material properties (e.g. light-matter interactions, electron transfer processes, charge transport, molecular recognition) of organic semiconductors, mainly conjugated polymers and oligomers, with applications in new generation solar cells, organic transistors and (biological) sensors. The current gap between missing fundamental understanding and the blind development of applications needs to be filled in order to achieve intelligent design of high performance devices. The research uses a physical-chemistry approach, but with multidisciplinary scope at the interface of chemistry, physics, engineering and materials science. It evolves around the central question of what happens on the ultrashort time scale and ultrasmall length scale in organic solids to induce macroscopic function in devices, and how this can be optimized. Experimentally, a unique and complementary palette of techniques combining time-resolved spectroscopy, pulsed photocurrent methods, terahertz experiments and device testing will be established.
Dr. Banerji currently leads her independent research team at EPFL, funded by a three-year SNSF Ambizione grant. She obtained her Ph. D. degree in physical chemistry from the University of Geneva in 2009, under the supervision of Prof. E. Vauthey. She then became fascinated with the properties of organic semiconductors during a post-doctoral stay with Nobel laureate Prof. A. J. Heeger at the University of California in Santa Barbara.
From July 2014, she is a new junior PI in the NCCR MUST.
The global objective is to understand fundamental material properties (e.g. light-matter interactions, electron transfer processes, charge transport, molecular recognition) of organic semiconductors, mainly conjugated polymers and oligomers, with applications in new generation solar cells, organic transistors and (biological) sensors. The current gap between missing fundamental understanding and the blind development of applications needs to be filled in order to achieve intelligent design of high performance devices. The research uses a physical-chemistry approach, but with multidisciplinary scope at the interface of chemistry, physics, engineering and materials science. It evolves around the central question of what happens on the ultrashort time scale and ultrasmall length scale in organic solids to induce macroscopic function in devices, and how this can be optimized. Experimentally, a unique and complementary palette of techniques combining time-resolved spectroscopy, pulsed photocurrent methods, terahertz experiments and device testing will be established.
Dr. Banerji currently leads her independent research team at EPFL, funded by a three-year SNSF Ambizione grant. She obtained her Ph. D. degree in physical chemistry from the University of Geneva in 2009, under the supervision of Prof. E. Vauthey. She then became fascinated with the properties of organic semiconductors during a post-doctoral stay with Nobel laureate Prof. A. J. Heeger at the University of California in Santa Barbara.
From July 2014, she is a new junior PI in the NCCR MUST.