DR. DERYA BARAN

Associate Professor, Material Science and Engineering

Physical Sciences and Engineering Division (PSE)

KAUST Solar Center (KSC)

Education Profile

  • ​Research Associate, Jülich Forschungszentrum, Germany, 2016

  • Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Plastic Electronics, Imperial College London, UK, 2015

  • PhD, Material Science and Engineering, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nurnberg, Germany, 2014

  • MSc, Chemistry, Middle East Technical University, Turkey, 2010

  • BSc, Chemistry, Middle East Technical University, Turkey, 2008

Research Interests

​Professor Baran's research interests lie in the area of solution processable organic/hybrid soft materials for electronic devices. Such soft semiconductor materials possess a viable platform for printed, large area, stretchable and wearable electronics that can be used as solar cells, smart windows, OFETs, thermoelectrics, sensors and bio-electronics.

​Professor Baran is particularly interested in interface engineering for organic/hybrid solar cells, transparent solar cells for building integrated photovoltaics and stability/degradation studies for long lifetime organic solar cells. She has led projects on

i) conjugated polymers for electrochromic devices;

ii) non-fullerene acceptors for organic solar cells;

iii) multi-component and multi-layered solar cell devices; and

iv) understanding the correlation between recombination and nano-morphology in solution-processed solar cells.

Professor Baran aims to expand the applications of solution-processable organic/hybrid semiconductors and to explore their limits in organic/hybrid thermoelectric devices and bio-electronics in the future.