Principal Investigator: Dr Kezia Sasitharan

About

Kez was born in Chennai in the south of India but was raised in the beautiful plains of Kapurthala, Punjab in the north-west of India. After completing her school education, she moved back to her birthplace to pursue a BSc in Chemistry at Women’s Christian College, affiliated with the University of Madras, India. She was an active member of the college having served as the Student President in 2014-15, and passed her degree with a distinction, 2 gold medals and prizes for outstanding contributions to the college community. She was awarded the University Grants Commission (UGC) prize for securing a university rank to pursue her postgraduate studies. She then moved to Christ University, Bangalore for her MSc in Chemistry during which she was awarded the Indian National Academy of Science (INSA) fellowship for summer research program. She interned with Prof T. Pradeep at IIT Madras working on electrospray ionisation of metal nanoparticles. The award of the prestigious University of Sheffield doctoral academy scholarship brought her to the UK to pursue her PhD. She worked with Dr Jonathan Foster and was co-supervised by Prof David Lidzey and Dr Ahmed Iraqi during her doctoral research. During her PhD she pioneered the use of metal-organic nanosheets (MONs) in organic photovoltaic devices and developed the highest performing fullerene-based organic solar cells reported to-date with a power conversion efficiency of 12.3%. She was awarded the DAAD Rise professional fellowship which enabled a research stay at Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin where she applied advanced photoemission spectroscopy to MON based organic solar cells. Following her PhD, Kezia had 2 postdoctoral stints. The first as a Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics (CAP) postdoctoral fellow at Prague, Czech Republic working on MXenes for perovskite solar cells. Her work was recognised with a honourable mention for the Tasilo Prnka Prize Prize awarded to scientists in Czech Republic under 33 years of age at the NANOCON meeting. Her second postdoctoral stay was at Newcastle University with Prof Marina Freitag where she implemented coordination polymers as solid-state hole transport materials in dye sensitized solar cells. In 2024, Kez was awarded the prestigious Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship to lead her own line of research where she is exploring conductive MONs for light-driven energy storage applications.