Sustainable device-­based approaches to energy harvesting and conservation

With global climate change and rising population density, energy scarcity has emerged as a fundamental limitation to the kind of environmentally sustainable technological progress needed to provide for a planet with 9 billion human beings by 2050. Any viable device-based solutions to this immense challenge must simultaneously satisfy the requirements of material and environmental sustainability, low-cost, and high-efficiency. In this talk, I will present some of my multi-pronged effort on a form of a solution through my work on plasmon-enhanced organic solar cells, spin-engineered organic LEDs, industrially viable printed low- cost solid state lighting technologies and fundamental studies of scaling of mobility in nanostructured organic solar cells. After a short discussion of my current work on inorganic flexible computing alternatives, I will conclude with an overview of some of the unsolved problems that hinder the development of high-performance, environmentally stable, and low-cost flexible electronics and photovoltaics. (~ 55 minutes)
Madhusudan Singh graduated at the top of his 5-year Integrated M. Sc. Physics program from IIT Kanpur in 1999. He carried out fundamental theoretical and numerical work in the study of transport in polar III-V nitride heterostructure junctions at the University of Michigan, where he earned his M. S. degrees in EE and in Mathematics in 2003 and Ph. D. (EE) in 2005. Among his original contributions were: the prediction of polarization contacts to wide bandgap III-V semiconductors, and the explanation for the puzzle of transconductance collapse in GaN HEMTs. His postdoctoral work at MIT led to the first demonstration of plasmon coupling in organic photovoltaics and the discovery of extrafluorescence in organic LEDs. He has since been a research scientist at Arizona State University, where he developed printing technologies for ultra-bright macromolecular OLEDs and reported the first nanoscale CELIV measurements of mobility in bulk heterojunction organic solar cells, and more recently at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he has helped identify the source of threshold voltage shifts in solution processed flexible chalcogenide CMOS for next generation flexible electronics. His continued academic service has involved serving as a panel / proposal reviewer for the US National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy, in addition to reviewing for several journals. His other interests lie in astronomy, fusion cooking, Indian and European history, and open-source software.