Jonathan Eugene HALPERT

Research interest

Prof. Jonathan E. Halpert’s research interests are in display technologies, energy conversion, nanomaterials, organic light emitting diode (OLED), and solar cells and solar fuels.

Biography

Prof. Jonathan E. Halpert is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST). Prof. Halpert’s work to date has focused on synthesizing novel nanomaterials in order to build thin film devices for optical and electronic applications.

Prof. Halpert started his career as an undergraduate majoring in ACS Chemistry at Tufts University with a minor in Mathematics. Afterwards he did his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he worked in the group of Prof. Moungi BAWENDI, investigating methods of designing and synthesizing semiconductor nanocrystal (NC) heterostructures for the use in nanocrystal optoelectronic devices, mainly quantum dot light emitting devices (QD-LEDs). He graduated with his PhD in Physical Chemistry with a thesis entitled “Design and Synthesis of Semiconductor Nanocrystals for Optoelectronic Applications”. In 2010, he received a Fellowship for Visiting Young Scientists to do postdoctoral work in the group of Prof. Dan WANG in the nanostructured materials division of the Institute for Process Engineering (IPE) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Beijing. Then he worked for two years as a postdoctoral researcher for Prof. Neil Greenham in the Optoelectronics Group in the Cavendish lab at the University of Cambridge. There he fabricated solar cells from CIS nanocrystals to understand excited state and charge dynamics in these devices. In October 2013, he left Cambridge and started as a lecturer at the Victoria University of Wellington (VUW) where he taught and performed research as a Rutherford Discovery Fellow (2014-2017) and associate investigator (2014-2016) in The MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials & Nanotechnology. In 2016, he became a senior lecturer in SCPS and a principal investigator (2016-2017) in The MacDiarmid Institute before joining HKUST in 2017.

Prof. Halpert is an author for over 45 papers, with more than 7,000 total citations (GS), and 10 US patents. His work has been published in such esteemed journals as the Journal of the American Chemical Society, ACS Nano, Nano Letters, Nature Photonics, Nature Communications, Energy & Environmental Science, Chemistry of Materials, the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, ACS Photonics, ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, the Journal of Materials Chemistry C and the Journal of Physical Chemistry C, among others. His group currently focuses on perovskite nanocrystals and optoelectronics.