DAAD - DOCTORAL CANDIDATE FROM TU DRESDEN HONORED WITH THE BEST POSTER AWARD

PhD Student Herman Heffner, DAAD candidate at the TU Dresden, has been honored with the best poster award of topic “Functional Surfaces, Materials and Devices” at the international Materials Science and Engineering Congress (MSE 2022), hold in Darmstadt (Germany).

Herman started wokring in April 2021 as a DAAD scholar at the Chair of Laser-Based Methods for Large-Scale Surface Structuring of Prof. Andrés Lasagni. Heffner is a PhD student from Argentina conducting research at the Universidad Nacional del Sur (Bahía Blanca, Argentina) on a grant from the National Council for Science and Technology (CONICET).

Heffner studied electrical engineering at the Universidad Nacional del Comahue in Argentina until 2017 and is now pursuing a doctorate on the topic: "Nanomaterials from titanium dioxide for dye-sensitized solar cells."

His research has focused on the theoretical study of titanium dioxide at the atomic scale using density functional theory. It is expected that the results of his dissertation will help the photovoltaic research community in the future to understand physical mechanisms that limit the performance of dye-sensitized solar cells and to find ways to overcome current technological limitations.

During the MSE2022, he presented a research poster dealing with the utilization of an innovative laser-based method, called "Direct Laser Interference Patterning" to treat the surfaces of transparent conducting oxides for enhancing their optical properties while keeping the electrical properties unaffected.

"It has been an honoured to have been awarded with this prize at the MSE, in particular considering the large amount of outstanding work presented by so many researches around the world”, said Heffner.

About the MSE 2022:
The Materials Science and Engineering Congress (MSE) is organized by the German Materials Society (DGM) each two years, in Germany. This time, MSE was hold as an hybrid congress from 27 to 29 September 2022, with about 1,000 participants. MSE is one of the largest English-speaking congresses in the field of Material Science and Engineering in Europe. Over the past decade, MSE has become an international platform for materials science and engineering experts to present their research to a large international community and network across borders.