Prof. Niyazi Serdar Sarıçiftçi

Linz Institute for Organic Solar Cells, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Linz, Austria

Niyazi Serdar Sarıçiftçi is Ordinarius Professor for Physical Chemistry and the Founding Director of the Linz Institute for Organic Solar Cells (LIOS) at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. He studied at the University of Vienna and received his PhD in physics in 1989. After two years of postdoctoral research at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, he joined the Institute for Polymers and Organic Solids at the University of California, Santa Barbara, working with Prof. Alan J. Heeger, recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

His major contributions are in photoinduced optical, magnetic resonance and transport phenomena in semiconducting and metallic polymers. Together with Alan Heeger, he is the inventor of conjugated polymer and fullerene based “bulk heterojunction” solar cells. Sariciftci has published over 600 papers, with more than 97,000 citations and a Google Scholar h-index above 136, and has authored 8 books. He has also co-founded seven spin-off companies for organic optoelectronics.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and of SPIE, a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), and a member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences. His awards include the National Science Prize of Turkey (2006), the Austrian Scientist of the Year Prize (2008), the City of Linz Medal for Humanity (2009), the Wittgenstein Prize of Austria (2012), the TÜBA Science Prize of the Turkish Academy of Sciences (2015), and the Selçuk Yaşar University Prize for Advancement of Science and Humanity (2020). He holds honorary doctorates from Åbo Akademi University, Finland (2011) and the University of Bucharest, Romania (2012), and in 2022 was elected a Fellow of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences.