Resnick Institute Director Jonas Peters, left, presents the 2017 Resnick Award to LANL’s Aditya Mohite. Courtesy photo
Caltech’s Director of Sustainability Programs John Onderdonk with Symposium Speakers Scott Jasechko and LANL’s Aditya Mohite. Courtesy photo
Aditya Mohite of Los Alamos National Laboratory received the 2017 Resonate Award at a special reception following the 2017 Resnick Young Investigators Symposium at Caltech.
“I am flattered with this honor that has been bestowed upon me and want to thank my parents, my wife Sunayana, my team at LANL, specifically Dr. Wanyi Nie, Dr. Jean Christophe Blancon and Hsinhan Tsai for their contribution and work,” Mohite said. “This distinction, in many ways is a reminder of the responsibility that I have embraced to make a difference to clean our planet of the harmful greenhouse emission that is destroying the environment and the ecosystem that we live in. The onus is on each and every one of us to make the right choices in day to day lives.”
Mohite received the Resonate Award for developing two-dimensional and thin-film materials for high-performance solar electricity generation. He is the PI of the Light to Energy team and directs an energy and optoelectronic devices lab working on understanding and controlling charge and energy transfer processes occurring at interfaces created with organic and inorganic materials for thin-film clean energy technologies at LANL.
The Challenge
We are faced with two grand challenges. First to meet the ever-growing demand for energy across the planet and second to overcome the serious threat of global warming. This will require a substantial reduction in greenhouse gases achieved through conscious choice by every individual, country and as a planet through energy efficiency as well as the deployment of renewable energy at a massive scale. Unfortunately, current solar energy generation requires large amounts of material, driving up costs in the manufacturing and installation of these systems. Developing high-efficiency solar energy devices that use a small fraction of the material in today’s solar panels could reduce weight, and material costs. Success would increase the rate at which solar power systems could be deployed, reducing global greenhouse gas emissions significantly while increasing energy access around the world.
The Response
Aditya’s passion lies in finding innovative and out-of-the-box concepts and solutions for the next generation of clean energy advances. His work focuses on key problems associated with a wide range of 0D, 1D and 2D materials such as carbon nanotubes, quantum dots, polymers, nanowires, graphene, transition metal dichalcogenides, developing unique and innovative low-temperature methods to integrate nanomaterials into thin-films, where the nanoscale materials retain their unique properties, but also give rise to new emergent behaviors that are intrinsic to the material. Achieving this requires an in-depth understanding and control of physical properties across multiple scales at relevant operating conditions. These strategies have translated to high performance devices with the stability required to be useful in the real world.
The Future
Solving these problems in the long term has the potential to help realize the full potential of nanoscale materials technology to generate renewable energy efficiently, by enabling devices with advantages in size, weight and power. These results could provide the key foundation for the fundamental and technological development of nanoscale materials for high-efficiency and stable devices for the next generation clean energy applications.
About Aditya Mohite
Mohite’s research philosophy is applying creative and “out-of-the-box” approaches to solve fundamental scientific bottlenecks and demonstrate technologically relevant performance in devices that is on par or exceeds the current state-of-the-art devices.
He has published more than 90 peer reviewed papers in journals such as Science, Nature, Nature Materials, Nature Nanotechnology, Nano Letters, ACS Nano, Chemical Society Reviews, Applied Physics Letters and Advanced Materials amongst others. He also has delivered more than 60 invited talks.
About the Awards
The Resonate Awards honor outstanding achievement in renewable energy and sustainability-focused science and technology.
Awarded to up-and-coming innovators under the age of 40, an ideal honoree’s work charts new pathways or opens up new areas to solutions with long-term impacts on sustainability challenges such as energy security, climate change and the environment.
Drawing on Caltech’s legacy of innovation, the Resnick Sustainability Institute seeks to recognize next-generation pioneers from around the world and their contributions to sustainability across all disciplines rooted in the sciences and technology.
Aditya Mohite gives thanks to his family and collaborators while providing an overview of his passion for finding innovative concepts and solutions for the next generation of clean energy advances. Courtesy photo
Aditya Mohite flanked by Professors William Goddard and Harry Atwater. Courtesy photo
