Dr. Zacharie Jehl Li-Kao holds a Master’s degree in Solid State Physics (2008) from the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France, and he received his PhD degree from the University Orsay Paris-Sud in 2012 after working at the Institute of Research and Development for Photovoltaic Energy (IRDEP, France). During those 3 years, his thesis was supervised by Prof. Daniel Lincot, CNRS silver medal, and he worked in the frame of a National Agency for Research (ULTRACIS) project involving 5 academic and public partners (IRDEP / CNRS, Supelec, Versailles University, SupOptic and photonic laboratory C2N) and 2 industrial partners from France and Germany (EDF and ZSW / Wuertz Solar). He reported for the first time an ultrathin CIGS solar cell (300nm absorber) with an engineered back contact using an innovative lift-off process. The milestones of the project were exceeded, hence allowing a new project to start based on the manufacturing of this technological breakthrough (ULTRACIS_M). His PhD thesis was received with the honors of the jury and was selected for the finals in the ParisTech thesis prize of 2013 (ranked 3rd overall). He was recruited at the end of his PhD thesis in 2012 as an assistant professor in Aoyama Gakuin University, Japan, in the group of the Professor Tokio Nakada. Dr. Jehl Li-Kao was corresponding researcher in collaborations with local groups on CIGS solar cells and tandem devices based on thin film materials, namely TokyoTech and Solar Frontier, and coordinated various tasks in those projects. He reported the world record for narrow bandgap efficiency CuIn(Se,Te) material and he was involved in a New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) collaboration on tandem solar cells based on Spectral Splitting, for which record efficiencies were obtained. He was awarded in 2015 with a 2 years grant from the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), and transferred to the University of Tokyo, number one ranked university in Japan. There, he focused his research on 3 rd generation photovoltaic devices, based on the epitaxy of III-V materials. At the end of those 2 years, Dr. Jehl L-Kao was recruited as a full member of the University with a position of Research Associate, in the frame a new project from the NEDO. During his stay at the University of Tokyo, he experimentally demonstrated for the first time the feasibility of energy selective extraction at room temperature using epitaxially-grown GaAs / AlGaAs asymmetric resonant barrier. He also contributed to developing an analytic approach by investigating the feedback of particle extraction on a hot carrier population, using the methodology «evaporative cooling» inspired by the field of cold atoms, and was a contributor to a landmark study on Intermediate band solar cells, demonstrating the necessity of an electronic ratchet to overcome the Shockley Queisser limit. I was a key member in the coordination of the Japanese French collaboration NEXTPV. During his stay in Japanese universities, he was assigned to scientific teaching duties both in English and Japanese. Dr. Jehl Li-Kao joined the Insitut de Recerca en Energia de Catalunya in August 2018, in the frame of 2 years a TecnioSpring MarieCurie action project (CLEARSUN). There, he focused his work on the development of semitransparent chalcogenide solar cells, and ventured into various research projects dealing with new PV applications and theoretical modeling of thin film devices. In 2020, Dr. Jehl Li-Kao started working on the SENSATE project at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.

Dr. Jehl Li-Kao has published more than 50 papers in peer reviewed journals, is the first inventor of 2 industrial patents, and has more than 150 contributions in international conferences (6 of which as invited speaker). He has been involved in numerous international collaboration, and is regularly reviewing manuscript for prominent journals in the field of thin films, optoelectronics and photovoltaics.