Jimmy Melskens, MSc

'“What we don’t understand is far greater than what we know” fuels my ambition to contribute to fundamental solar cell research and open up new opportunities to industrial developments.'

Jimmy Melskens is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Applied Physics in the group Plasma & Material Processing (PMP) at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). He is currently primarily working on the development of transparent passivating contact materials fabricated by atomic layer deposition with a particular focus on metal oxides. While this work is conducted in the context of crystalline silicon solar cells, Jimmy is also experienced in the field of thin-film silicon solar cells due to his PhD project during which he studied the nanostructure of hydrogenated amorphous silicon and the defects in this material.

Jimmy obtained his BSc (2004), MSc (2007), and PhD (2015) degrees in Electrical Engineering from Delft University of Technology. Parts of his doctoral thesis were carried out in collaboration with Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin (HZB) in Germany and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan. During his PhD he received the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference in 2014. After moving to TU/e as a postdoc he has been involved in four national TKI Urban Energy crystalline silicon photovoltaics research projects as the main TU/e representative and has acted as a project leader in two of those projects. In 2017 he received an NWO Veni grant for carrying out extended fundamental work on crystalline silicon surface passivation by novel thin film materials.