 Climate change is a serious threat to our environment and our way of life. One of the things we'd like to do as a society is to reduce our dependence upon fossil fuels for things like electricity and fuel and transportation. One very renewable, very abundant resource that we know of is of course the sun. There's enough energy that comes from the sun and hits the air service within an hour and a half to fully provide for the entire world's energy requirements for an entire year. So the question of abundance of renewable energy from the sun is not in doubt at all. It's just a matter of harnessing it. Solar panels are made from a material, silicon. The cost for a rooftop system to power your home could range from a few thousand to ten to fifteen thousand dollars. What our research is focusing on is trying to come up with new materials to drastically reduce the cost of solar technology. And the materials that we're focusing on for the most part are organic based materials, either polymers or other molecules that can be dissolved into solutions and then basically printed onto a substrate, flexible or glass and then wired up with the metal electrodes to produce the solar cell for much less cost. Some of these are the lab scale solar cells as you can see. It's probably a little difficult to see the actual active material underneath these metal electrodes but you can see the metal electrodes that are under there. Those darker patches where the metal fingers are would be the actual active material absorbing the light.