Optigon

It’s a pleasure to welcome our newest member of the team, Minhal Hasham, Ph. D. ??. Minhal comes to us from his postdoc in Professor and President Paul Alivisatos' group at the University of Chicago. There he was leading research in semiconductor nanocrystal characterization using advanced spectroscopy tools and data science techniques such as machine learning ?? ??. He graduated with his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of Toronto working with Professor Mark Wilson. At Optigon, Minhal will be spearheading efforts in designing, prototyping and building our next generation of products ??????. With previous experience at a software startup, he will also be driving advances in our automated analysis platform and rapid interpretation of multimodal data sets. Welcome to the team Minhal! ?? ?? Please keep an eye out for future career opportunities as our team continues to grow! ??

The end of 2024 was a really exciting time for Optigon ??. We were one of the ten startups invited to showcase at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's 40th anniversary of Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL). A huge honor to be amongst many of the disruptive startups, partners, and industrial members of MTL ??. We also had a very busy week during the Materials Research Society Conference ???. Thanks to many of those who came out to Greentown Labs and to MIT to see a demonstration of our automated, multimodal tool (Prism) in action as well as to Ethan S.'s poster?? ??. Special thanks to colleagues and collaborators Tonio Buonassisi, Alexander (Aleks) E. Siemenn, Vladimir Bulovic, Sam Stranks, David Ginger, Timothy Siegler, Matthew T. Klug, Mahshid Ahmadi, Adam Lorenz, Bin Chen, David Fenning, Juan-Pablo Correa-Baena, Stefania Cacovich, Eunice Aissi, Jisu Hong, Elizabeth Wall, Karen Yang, Basita Das, Vivek Babu, Ph.D., Elham Foadian, Sheryl Sanchez, Connor Dolan, Stella Lessler, Brenden P., Marina Leite, Aaron Zhu, Shaun Tan, and Alan Kaplan.

Ethan S., a visiting researcher at Optigon from the University of Washington, will be presenting a poster on "Optimizing Perovskite Solar Cell Stability Through Automated, Multimodal Characterization" at the Fall MRS Conference tonight from 8-10p. Please stop by and learn what new research our Optigon Prism tool has enabled!

It's always exciting to be part of Greentown Labs annual #ClimatetechSummit Two weeks ago, Optigon was one of 74 startups to showcase at Greentown's Boston campus. We had the opportunity to welcome over 600 guests into our lab space and gave a behind-the-scenes peek into some of our latest work - including a live demo of #Prism, our high-throughput materials characterization platform for clean energy research. A huge thanks to the Greentown team for bringing the climatetech community together and making this event possible!

Last week I had the opportunity to attend my first CdTe Workshop hosted by the The University of Toledo in Ohio. It was a special experience getting to spend time with so many of the scientists that laid the foundation for the success of CdTe PV, which has culminated in >25 GW deployed globally by First Solar. It was also nice to reconnect and meet new friends such as Michael Heben, Bill Huber, Matthew Reese, Rachel Goldman, Kevin Dobson, William Shafarman, Jim Sites, Mike Scarpulla, Dingyuan Lu, Camden Kasik, Jason Baxter, Marco Nardone, Alex Ashley, Kyle Lu, Intuon Chatratin, and many others! One of the highlights was getting to tour the Jim Nolan Center for Solar Innovation, a new 1.3M! sq. ft. R&D space, which has an impressive pilot manufacturing line for full module prototypes and tandem PVs. Looking forward to the next workshop!

We are very excited to have Ethan S. as a visiting researcher from University of Washington and the Washington Clean Energy Testbeds. Ethan is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Mechanical Engineering in Devin MacKenzie's group and specializes in large area perovskite deposition, in-situ characterization, and machine learning. He will be splitting his time between our lab at Greentown Labs and Tonio Buonassisi's group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Welcome to the team Ethan!

Last month our Chief Science Officer, Dane deQuilettes, traveled to Perugia, Italy for the Perovskite Solar Cells and Optoelectronics Conference (PSCO). He gave a presentation on “Non-Contact Characterization of Perovskites: Relating Material Properties to Device Performance” and also attended the Industry Day, where many leading perovskite companies presented their latest cutting-edge results. Microquanta, Oxford PV, Utmolight, Saule Technologies Inc., First Solar, PEROVSKIA SOLAR AG, Rayleigh Solar Tech, GCL Technology Holdings Limited, Renshine Solar, Swift Solar, PXP Corporation, Helio Display Materials, imec. With definitive plans of several gigawatts (GWs) of production capacity by 2025, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that perovskites are coming to market and our team is excited to help manufacturers reach bankability along the way. ?? ?? In particular, we have again seen a strong need to relate indoor accelerated stress testing of PV modules to outdoor performance with root-cause analysis of degradation modes. Some companies have now collected field data of 100’s of kW of deployed perovskite modules showing negligible degradation over several years of operation. Other companies claimed to have indoor test results compatible with 25 years of operation in the field. In both cases, these are the most promising module stability, reliability, and durability studies shown to date! We want to highlight that these results have only been demonstrated for a small selection of devices/modules. There is still a lot of work needed to understand the processing and encapsulation science that will enable GW scale deployment with guaranteed performance over several decades. We see Optigon’s quality control/characterization tools being a critical part of this research as well as qualification tests, where our automated measurements rapidly isolate material and device parameters that change over time. With this data, manufacturers can quickly make strategic decisions to improve device quality and performance. It’s a very exciting time to be a part of this new wave in the solar industry and we can’t wait to work with many of you. ??

The summer at Optigon has come to an end, I’ve graduated from Gründerskolen, and my Boston adventure is sadly over??. I want to extend a big thank you to the Optigon team for giving me the opportunity to learn about startups, the solar industry, and solar materials??. This summer, I primarily worked on the business aspects of the company, gaining insights into new business cultures and strategies for entering new markets. It’s been an honor to work with such a talented team! Thank you for your guidance, for the good answers to all of my questions, and for making this experience unforgettable. I’m cheering for Optigon’s future! Alongside this, I’ve graduated from Gründerskolen ??, where I gained a better understanding of entrepreneurship and American business culture, as well as the opportunity to work with skillful and inspiring people. This summer has been an amazing experience, and I’m returning home with new experiences, knowledge, and new friendships??

Optigon is beginning to review applications for the Founding Engineer position recently posted (https://lnkd.in/et_it2aX). If you plan on applying or know someone who would be a great fit, there’s still time and we want to hear from you!?

The last few weeks have been busy for our team! We attended and presented at a Gordon Research Conference (Newry, Maine) ??, the Accelerate Conference (Vancouver, British Columbia), and the DOE sponsored ADDEPT/TEAMUP workshop (Boulder, Colorado)??. Attending these meetings has allowed us to more deeply understand the pain points of materials characterization and optimization in both academia and in industry ?? ?? . For perovskite materials, we have been seeing even more effort towards root-cause analysis of degradation modes in thin films and photovoltaic devices under accelerated stress and outdoor tests ?? ?. Although perovskite modules are lasting longer in the field, there is still a significant amount of work that needs to be done in order to reach degradation rates comparable to silicon and CdTe. We see major opportunities for in-situ measurements during degradation beyond?post-mortem analysis and are adapting our tools to monitor key material parameters over time and in extreme environments ????. In the autonomous and self-driving lab space, we saw many exciting examples of automated research instruments being put to work to accelerate the discovery and optimization of new materials orders of magnitude faster than traditional research workflows. We noticed a growing maturity of automated materials synthesis tools within the community and a broad range of options extending from low-cost, open-source hardware to plug-and-play commercial toolsets. We’re excited to be part of this growing community and at the forefront of commercial solutions purpose-built for automated characterization ?? ??. We really enjoyed connecting with old friends and colleagues Mike McGehee, Tonio Buonassisi, Laura Schelhas, David Fenning, Sarah Kurtz, Ted Sargent, Nick Rolston, Vladimir Bulovic, Rebecca Belisle, Dak Benjia Dou, Seth Marder, Barry Rand, Zachary Holman, Michael Toney, Skylar Bagdon, Joey Luther, Timothy Siegler, Ron Sinton, Andrew Gabor, Fang Sheng, Amy Louks and also making many new ones Ryan A DeCrescent, Bin Chen, Richards (Chad) Miller, Cheng-Pei Ouyang, Elizabeth Wall, Alan Kaplan, Maimur Hossain and many others!