Roel van de Krol is head of the Insitute for Solar Fuels at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie (HZB), and professor at the Chemistry Department of TU Berlin. After earning his PhD from TU Delft in 2000 and a postdoctoral stay at M.I.T. (USA), he returned to TU Delft where he was an assistant professor until 2012. At HZB, his research focuses on the development of materials and devices for the photoelectrochemical conversion of sunlight to chemical fuels. Understanding how surface and bulk defects in thin films and nanomaterials affect light absorption, charge transport, recombination and catalytic activity is at the heart of these efforts. At TU Berlin, he teaches a course on Photo-Electrochemical Energy Conversion in the winter semester.

At the Institute for Solar Fuels at HZB we develop new materials and devices that enable efficient and cost-effective production of chemical fuels from cheap and abundant resources, such as water and CO₂, using sunlight. Towards this end, we i) develop deposition processes and synthesis routes for thin film and nanostructured semiconductors and catalysts, and ii) investigate the fundamental processes of charge generation, separation and transfer in the bulk and at the surfaces and interfaces of these materials. Of particular interest is the role of defects, which we aim to control by developing thermal treatments, passivation layers and doping strategies. Our experimental toolbox includes a range of thin film deposition techniques (ALD, PLD, sputtering), electrochemistry and photo-electrochemistry, time-resolved spectroscopy on fs – s time scales, and synchrotron-based methods.

Born on 12 July 1971 in Drunen, The Netherlands
Nationality: Dutch
E-mail: r.vandekrol(at)tu-berlin.de