UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Nelson Y. Dzade, assistant professor of energy and mineral engineering in the Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, has received a 2024 Early Career Research Award from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Dzade will use the five-year, $875,000 award to develop a multi-scale framework for predicting and understanding interfaces in solar cells.
Dzade is one of two faculty from Penn State who were selected by the DOE for Early Career Research Awards. Lucas Muechler in the Eberly College of Science was also awarded funding. They are among the 91 early career scientists from across the nation awarded funding through the program. This year’s awardees represent 50 universities and 12 DOE national laboratories across the country.
“It is an incredible honor for me to be selected for this prestigious award,” Dzade said. “I feel super blessed to be considered among the nation’s outstanding early research scientists who are helping tackle some of the toughest challenges and help secure the economic competitiveness of the United States for decades to come.”
Dzade said he’s ready to get to work on his project titled “Multiscale Modeling of Heteroepitaxial Interfaces for Scalable Thin-Film Solar Cell Applications.”
Thin-film solar devices consist of a multilayer structure and the properties and atomic-scale dynamics of their interfaces play an important role in the overall device performance and stability. Consequently, advances in thin-film solar cells can greatly benefit from detailed atomic-level analysis, which provides insight into the interface structure and properties that can be exploited to improve performance, according to Dzade.
“Providing clean sustainable energy is among the most urgent challenges to society and the global economy and poses fundamental, exciting scientific questions,” Dzade said. “Solar energy has long been on the horizon as one of the important solutions in green energy production because the solar resource is super-abundant and freely available.”
Dzade plans to develop and implement a multiscale modeling environment that will integrate a wide range of advanced computational approaches and complementary experiments to get a complete microscopic picture of interfacial phenomena in solar materials. His team plans to train high-accuracy machine learning models to enable large-scale molecular dynamics simulations of the structure and evolution of the complex interfaces in solar cells.
Given their complexity, narrow widths and typical positions buried inside bulk materials, interfaces are difficult to resolve or access by purely experimental means. Simulation and modeling are ideally suited to complement experiments and supply the missing information, according to Dzade. This project will not only help to identify specific bottlenecks to the performance of photovoltaic devices but also enable an insight-driven optimization of interfacial properties to achieve more efficient and stable solar cells with obvious socio-economic and environmental benefits.
“Considering the complex nature of interfaces, it is vital to see this with different eyes,” Dzade said. “This research can only happen in an interdisciplinary environment like Penn State, where I can engage with a multidisciplinary team of experimental collaborators, such as those in the Department of Material Science and Engineering and the Materials Research Institute. Here, we have the state-of-the-art computational and experimental tools and can really build that collaborative, back-and-forth loop of information sharing so we can develop and validate our models and understand the bigger picture of interfaces.”
Dzade said he hopes the work will inspire a new generation of young scientists to pursue the emerging technologies of quantum computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning — research areas he believes hold the key to innovation-based competitiveness and a more sustainable and equitable future.
“With this award and the recent Solar District Cup win, I see the excitement around energy engineering among the students growing,” Dzade said. “And we need energy engineers because they are at the forefront of the sustainable energy movement, playing a pivotal leadership role in advancing energy solutions that are environmentally friendly and economically viable.”
Dzade leads the Materials and Mineral Theory Group, which specializes in the development and application of advanced theoretical methods to unravel structure-property-performance relationships in solid-state materials. He is the program chair of the energy engineering program in the John and Willie Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering and co-director of AESEDA: the Alliance for Education, Science, Engineering, and Design with Africa.
Before joining Penn State in 2021, Dzade was the U.K. Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s Research and Innovation Fellow and Independent Group Leader in Cardiff University’s School of Chemistry. He also was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Earth Sciences at Utrecht University in The Netherlands.
Dzade received his bachelor of science degree in applied statistics from the University for Development Studies in Tamale, Ghana, his master of science degree in materials science from the African University of Science and Technology in Abuja, Nigeria, his postgraduate diploma degree in materials science from the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bangalore, India, and his doctoral degree in computational materials science from the University College London in England. The goal of DOE’s Early Career Research Program is to bolster the nation’s scientific workforce by supporting exceptional researchers at the outset of their careers. Since its inception in 2010, the program has distributed 961 awards, with 631 awards going to university researchers and 330 awards to national laboratory researchers.