 I'm Jess Adams. I'm a scientist at Imperial and I work on developing the next generation of solar cells. People spend a lot of time drilling for oil and shoveling coal. We use nuclear, gas, coal and oil for producing electricity. All of these have an effect on the environment and the atmosphere too. These sources of energy are also running out, but there are alternatives. A gigantic renewable power station in the sky, the Sun. Eight minutes and 18 seconds after leaving the Sun, sunlight arrives on Earth and we can use it for generating electricity. Solar cells are called photovoltaic cells. I'm here in Hawaii for the big photovoltaic conference of the year. Hawaii's been spectacular. It's got volcanoes, rainforests, beaches, coasts. There's absolutely loads you can do for adventure junkies. We're having an absolutely fantastic time. When I started my PhD, green energy really appealed to me. I am a vegetarian. Saving the world was definitely something I had in mind. Let's go into the exhibition hall. This is where all the industrial exhibitors have their stands. Travel is really a big part of being a scientist. There's a lot you can do over the phone and over email, but the best thing of all is to be face-to-face in a room with someone. We're trying to do a new top cell. And as a PhD student, it is so important to get your name and to get your face out there and especially if you're able to manage to get a talk at these conferences. Because Jess did A-level physics and went on to do a degree and then a PhD in solar research, she gets to go here. Where she'll talk about her research to 1,000 people at the conference. I was nervous the day before, but when it got to the morning, I felt absolutely fine and it just, it went really well. Thank you for the introduction, Ryan, and thanks very much for having me here to speak today. I'd like to thank all my co-authors and colleagues at Imperial College London first. Also from the University of Sheffield in the UK and from the US Naval Research Laboratory where I did a lot of the measurements I'm going to speak about. I'll start off with an introduction to the Quantum Well solar cell. My speech was very, very important. Thank you. It went really well. I feel like I nailed it. A lot of people came up and said nice talk. That was absolutely brilliant. Thank you. I got a fair few people, you know, saying if you're interested in working for this company or that company, you know, drop me an email. Where would I like to be this time of the year? I would like to be a board. I don't want to live in Britain anymore because the weather's horrible. I'm Robert Walters, conference chairperson. Career chances are absolutely phenomenal. If you specifically talk about females in the sciences, there's still more male scientists than there are females. And so as a young female going into the sciences, there's definitely a very positive place to be and the job opportunities are abundant. And they're all over the world. Because solar panels are portable, they can be used almost anywhere in the world. As long as the sun is shining, solar doesn't produce as much power when it's cloudy. But in places with sunny climates, solar cells are often the best option. When a lot of people think about solar, they think of it in context of it being really helpful in the fight against climate change. But there is another really important application for solar. It can really help in villages in, for example, India and sub-Saharan Africa. Solar can be great because it can be absolutely standalone. You can go and install a solar module out in the village. For example, if you can give the village enough power to charge up torch batteries so that they have light in the evening, this can extend people's working hours. Being able to be more productive in the evening can have an absolutely massive impact in fields like education. It can really make a big difference in people's lives. I'm here with Rahul and Albin, who are both from my research group. My name is Rahul Bose. I'm a PhD student at Imperial College London working in solar energy. Light is remitted, typically isotrophically. I'm really happy to have studied physics. With physics, you get a really broad, nice education and you really do understand a lot of stuff. At least you can get your head around a lot of things. The only reason that I am sitting here on the beach in Hawaii now is because I chose to do physics. This is my university where I've been since 2002. It's called Imperial College London and come and have a look around. Welcome! Jess works at Imperial College London where she designs and tests the next generation of solar cells. At the moment, solar cells' efficiency is limited by the amount of sunlight they can actually use so only a fraction of the sun's energy gets converted. This is a collection of four test solar cells that I'm measuring in my lab. These are each one square millimeter, I think. This experiment is one of several different experiments we use to characterize our solar cells. We've got a solar cell, this tiny black square so I can make electrical connections with wires. There's this box which is plugged in so I can measure the current that is generated by my solar cells. At the other end, there's a light source inside this box and the light source passes through this box which is called a monochromator and we use this to separate the white light source into all the different wavelengths or colors. When it passes through this box you will only get one wavelength of light coming out of this slit. It's actually really dim once it's passed through all the optics. Yeah, I've got green coming out at the moment and there's a really dim green beam of light coming out. It comes out, it passes through these two lenses to focus it. What I'm doing, I'm shining one specific wavelength of light onto the solar cell. I'm measuring how much current is produced by the solar cell at that wavelength of light. I do the experiments so I can figure out whether the solar cell that I've just designed is performing in the way it ought to so I model the solar cell, design it and then I see if the experimental results match the modelling results. I am standing outside my office at the moment and this is where lots of the students from my group work this is where we do all our computing and desktop work. This is the modelling software that we use to help us design our solar cells and then once we've had the solar cells made for us then we do some experiments on them so this takes the data from the experiment that I was showing you in the lab earlier and we compare it with the answers that the model gives us and this helps us to really understand the physics that's going on inside the cell. What we're trying to achieve with these solar cells is to be able to make really high efficiency solar cells such that solar energy is a cost competitive way of producing electricity. All of the energy sources that we can use apart from nuclear come from the sun so why not just harness the sun directly it seems like a much more efficient way of doing it to me. I've got a job now it's really great news because I've got a job in the state it's doing exactly what I wanted to do it's a solar cell R&D I'm in Chicago next year.