T.T. Prof. Dr.
Pascal Friederich
Position:
Head of the AI for Materials Science lab at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technolog
Role in Solar TAP:
Principal Investigator
Research Institution:
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Introduction
Prof. Dr. Pascal Friederich is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, focusing on AI for Materials Science. After his Ph.D. in physics, he received a Marie-Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University and the University of Toronto, where he worked on machine learning methods for chemistry.
In 2020, he was appointed Assistant Professor at the Informatics Department at KIT and co-appointed at the Institute of Nanotechnology. There, he leads the AI for Materials Science (AiMat) research group, which focuses on developing and applying machine learning methods for property prediction, simulation, understanding, and design of molecules and materials. A special area of interest includes graph neural networks, generative models for inverse design, machine learning potentials for accelerated atomistic simulations, as well as machine learning-based data analysis and decision-making methods for materials acceleration platforms and self-driving labs.
Solar TAP Project
Contribution to Solar TAP:
His contributions to SolarTAP focus on the virtual design aspects using machine learning methods. His lab contributes to the SolarTAP digital twin – a unique and ambitious scale-bridging modeling effort to link all aspects and parameters of solar cells to the energy yield. This will help better understand how the smallest detail, such as a single methyl group in a molecule, will influence the energy yield that a solar panel will have over its entire lifetime. Thus, it opens completely new ways of optimizing solar cells in the most efficient and meaningful way.
Uniqueness of Solar TAP:
The combination of state-of-the-art photovoltaics research and transfer to industrial applications makes Solar TAP a unique opportunity for direct impact of fundamental science in the real-world. It is exciting to be part of this project and I look forward to seeing how our digital twin might change photovoltaics development in the future.
Contact Information
Email: pascal.friederich(at)kit.edu
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pascal-friederich-6088b9117/