Prof. Zakya H. Kafafi

Dr. Kafafi was born in Cairo, Egypt. She received her Ph.D. from Rice University. She worked at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, DC where she led an interdisciplinary research team, and established a section on Organic Optoelectronics. Her work has been motivated by emerging technologies based on organic electronics and photonics. She moved to NSF when she was appointed the Director of the Division of Materials Research. Dr Kafafi was a Visiting Scholar/Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and, at Northwestern working with the groups of Chérie Kagan and Tobin Marks, respectively. She was the President of the Spectroscopic Associates, Inc. where she designed a cryogenic link that rotates and translates in vacuum for which she won an R&D (Research & Development) IR 100 Award. She received an NRL Edison Patent Award for inventing a simple two-step, cost-effective method to pattern conducting polymers for flexible optoelectronic devices. Since 2008 she served as Adjunct Professor and more recently as Distinguished Research Fellow in the ECE Department of Lehigh University where her research focused on Plasmonic Nanostructured Organic Photovoltaics. Dr. Kafafi is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the SPIE Journal of Photonics for Energy, and the Inaugural Deputy Editor of Science Advances. She serves on the Advisory Boards of the IEEE Photonics Journal and the Conference on Spin in Organic Semiconductors. She is the Chair of the MRS Award Nominations Subcommittee. She organizes and chairs the annual SPIE Symposium on Organic Photonics + Electronics, and the Conference on Organic, Hybrid, and Perovskites Photovoltaics (OHPVs). She is a member of Sigma Xi and ACS, and is a Fellow of AAAS, MRS, OSA and SPIE. Dr. Kafafi is a recipient of the Hillebrand Prize, the ACS Chemical Society of Washington’s highest honor, and the Kuwait Prize in Applied Sciences in the field of Renewable and Sustainable Energy.