Scott Watkins: Printable thin-film photovoltaics at CSIRO
The roll-to-roll printing process promises to make photovoltaics a practical energy source almost anywhere.
Scott Watkins leads CSIRO's research stream on Organic Photovoltaics (OPVs). This includes scientists working across CSIRO at laboratories based in both Melbourne and Newcastle.
In the area of OPVs, CSIRO is a key member of the Victorian Organic Solar Cell Consortium (VICOSC) which includes researchers from the University of Melbourne, Monash University, and industry partners Securency, BlueScope Steel, Innovia Films and Robert Bosch SEA. VICOSC draws together the resources of Australia's leading research institutions and companies to develop technologies enablingthe production of low-cost, printable, organic solar cells.
Watkins received his PhD in Chemistry from the University of New South Wales, Australia. He spent four years in the United Kingdom as a postdoctoral fellow at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities and as a research scientist at Cambridge Display Technology, working on materials and devices for high-efficiency OLEDs. He joined CSIRO in 2004 and has led the development of the research on thin-film solar cells.
He has published more than 40 peer-reviewed papers and is an inventor on 10 patent applications in the field of organic electronics. He was named Early Career Scientist by the National Executive of the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies (now Science and Technology Australia). He was a panelist at SPIE Optics + Photonics 2013, discussing Emerging and Future Photovoltaic Technologies.
