I-MEET is celebrating its 10th anniversary! Annual report 2018-2019
I-MEET celebrated its 10th anniversary with the holding of the Next Generation Solar Energy Conference in Nuremberg in December in the presence of many alumni and cooperation partners. I-MEET has established itself as one of FAU’s research strongholds. With an above-average number of highly-cited publications in most respected journals, a large number of doctoral students, many of whom already having started extraordinarily successful academic careers, and a large number of externally funded projects, I-MEET has contributed to FAU’s continuous rise in national and international rankings.
A formative event for all of us was the transfer of parts of our research activities into the Helmholtz Association. Thanks to the support of all those involved, in particular our colleagues from the Helmholtz Institute Erlangen-Nuremberg (HI-ErN), the Bavarian State Ministry for Economy and the Board of Directors of Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ), we were able to successfully establish the Department of High Throughput Methods in Photovoltaics Research. Since September 2018 we are researching with a team of about 25 people on the development of automated and also autonomous laboratories for semiconductor research as well as on imaging measurement methods, which, together with evaluation algorithms from machine learning, will make photovoltaic technologies more sustainable, more predictable and more cost-effective.