Julia van der Burgt wins Young Speakers Contest

Former AMOLF PhD student Julia van der Burgt has won the Young Speakers Contest organized by the Netherlands’ Physical Society (NNV). The contest was part of the annual FYSICA event on May 26th. The audience at this event listened to three presentations and were asked to vote afterwards leading to van der Burgt winning first prize.

In a ten minute presentation, van der Burgt talked about ‘Training perovskite to behave: from bug to feature’, a topic on which she spent quite some time during her doctoral research at AMOLF. Perovskites are a promising new material for solar cells, but they are also known as instable and therefore difficult to apply in solar cells. Van der Burgt managed to turn perovskites into a smart material that can learn. Introducing certain input stimuli made the material copy the input, and more frequent training resulted in improved imitation.

Van der Burgt defended her thesis ‘Directive dielectric designs for high efficiency photovoltaics’ in 2022 and she currently works on adaptive window foils at the start-up company ClimAd Technology in Eindhoven.