Date: Wednesday, November 11th  2015 

Time: 11:00 AM 

Location: Building 4, Room 125

Visiting Scholar in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry at the University of Toronto

 

 

Dr. Ahmed Abdelrahman is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry at the University of Toronto.  He earned an MSc in Electronics Chemistry from Tokyo Institute of Technology (2006) and PhD in Polymers and Materials Chemistry at the Chemistry Department, University of Toronto (2011). Dr Abdelrahman also holds a Senior Scientist position at SABIC Center of Research and Innovation - King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST).

 

At Professor Ohsaka Laboratories, Dr Abdelrahman investigated the catalytic activity of 2-5 nm gold nanoparticles self-assembly on the reduction of oxygen molecules for fuel cell applications as a part of his Master thesis research. He found that the gold nanoparticles work as a charge antenna that enables reviving the catalytic activity of the passivated bulk gold electrodes. During his PhD under the supervision of Professor Mitchell Winnik, Dr Abdelrahman developed Lanthanide-encoded particles as novel reagents for single-cell proteomics and gene assays.  For this, Ahmed Was featured as the Young Analytical Scientist in the Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectroscopy in the special issue 3, 2010. In 2011, and as post-doctoral fellow at Professor Bender laboratories, Dr Abdelrahman designed and synthesized novel small semiconductor organic molecules for organic and polymeric solar cells. Consequently, he joined SABIC, in 2012, to establish their energy-efficient optoelectronics platform at their new Center of Research and Innovation at KAUST campus. In the last three years, Dr Ahmed has mentored, coached and co-supervised graduate students and junior researchers. His team has developed 4 corporate research projects in the fields of consumer electronics novel materials.

 

To date, Dr Abdelrahman research results were published in 17 peer reviewed articles and received hundreds of citations with h index of 9. Ahmed is also the inventor of several polymeric, small molecules and hybrid materials for optoelectronic devices like OPV and OLED. He has more than 10 granted patents and 18 patent applications in the review process. Dr Abdelrahman research has received international recognition; Ahmed was the recipient of the Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS), Helen Sawyer Hogg Graduate Award, and Honors Monbush Scholarship from the Japanese government.

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In contrast to conventional resources such as fossil fuels, the Sun provides a reliable, sustainable and lasting supply of energy, and can therefore help to solve the growing global need for energy. One effective method of converting solar energy into a useful form like electricity makes use of solar cells and is based on the photovoltaic effect. Silicon, gallium arsenide and other compound miconductors, have been reported to achieve power conversion efficiencies (PCEs) if up to nearly 30%. However, current such solar cells have limited use at large scales, because the high manufacturing costs. The development of new solar cell technologies with lower production costs (through the use of economical and abundant materials and inexpensive processes) is therefore of great interest to the energy industry.In my presentation, I will give an overview of our recent research activities to find alternatives for the expensive active materials (like single crystal Si), the brittle transparent electrodes (for example: indium tin oxide, ITO) and consequently the inefficient processes (e.g. crystal growth and microfabrication). As for the semiconducting active materials, we have designed and synthesized phthalocyanine-based small organic molecules, novel polythiophenes and oligo-chalcogenophene as well as perovskite 

nanocrystals to serve as alternatives for the incumbent Si ​semiconductors. As of the ITO replacement, I will show our patented silver nanowire based transparent flexible electrodes.