Events @ Warwick Chemistry

On Friday 17 March at 11am in L3, Prof Jamie Neilson (Colorado State University, USA) will deliver an invited seminar titled “Organic cation dynamics in hybrid halide semiconductors”. Please find his abstract and bio below.

Everyone is welcome to attend, and if anyone wishes to meet with Jamie please get in touch with either myself (struan.simpson@warwick.ac.uk) or Mark Senn (m.senn@warwick.ac.uk).

Abstract: Hybrid halide perovskite semiconductors exhibit nearly ideal properties for myriad optoelectronic applications, including photovoltaics, light emission, and radiation detection. Curiously, these properties coexist with complex, organic cation-derived dynamic disorder and extensive chemical substitution. Neutron scattering and nuclear spectroscopy studies of these materials have yielded significant insight to the nature of the organic cation dynamics and how these dynamics are impacted by chemical substitution. The dynamic degrees of freedom of the hybrid halide perovskites provide additional opportunities for application engineering and innovation not found in conventional compound semiconductors.

Bio: James Neilson studied Materials Science & Engineering at Lehigh University for his undergraduate degree, completing research with Professor Himanshu Jain, as well as Professor Stephen Elliot at the University of Cambridge during a summer exchange. James earned his Ph.D. in 2011 from the University of California Santa Barbara working with Professor Daniel Morse and Professor Ram Seshadri. He then performed postdoctoral research at Johns Hopkins University with Professor Tyrel McQueen until 2013, hired in chemistry but working in the walls of the physics department. In 2013, he joined the faculty of Colorado State University as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry. Since then, he has received numerous awards for his research and teaching, including the Sloan Research Fellowship from the A. P. Sloan Foundation, the Cottrell Scholar Award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, and early career awards from both the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation. Since his promotion to Associate Professor, James has received a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship to spend the 2022-2023 academic year at the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at the University of Oxford. The key research theme throughout this journey has been to understand how materials synthesis influence structure and properties, particularly when atomistic disorder plays a key role.