Prof. Robert Hoye, CEng CSci FIMMM MRSC MInstP

oxford energy network
Associate Professor of Inorganic Chemistry
Department of Chemistry, University of Oxford
robert.hoye@chem.ox.ac.uk

STFC-RAEng Senior Research Fellow

Tutorial Fellow of St. John's College, Oxford

CTO of NanoPrint Innovations Ltd.

Honorary Senior Lecturer (Imperial College London) and Honorary Fellow of the Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology (Canada)

 

Bio: He completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge (2012-2014), followed by a postdoc at MIT (2015-2016), then two independent Research Fellowships at Magdalene College (2016-2019) and Downing College (2019-2020) in Cambridge. He became an independent Principal Investigator in 2018 through the Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship, which he initially held at the University of Cambridge, before moving to Imperial College as a Lecturer in Jan. 2020. He became an Associate Professor in the University of Oxford in Oct. 2022, and CTO of startup NanoPrint Innovations Ltd. in late 2023.

Location: Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3QR

Education and Training

After graduating from the University of Auckland (New Zealand) with a first-class degree, Hoye was awarded a Cambridge-Rutherford Memorial scholarship to pursue a PhD at the University of Cambridge, which was focussed on developing oxide charge transport layers for optoelectronic devices, working with Judith Driscoll.

He subsequently took up a postdoctoral position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), working with Tonio Buonassisi, and collaborating with Moungi Bawendi (2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry) and Vladimir Bulović, as well as Mike McGehee (formerly Stanford, now U. Colorado) and Vladan Stevanović (NREL). There, he developed lead-free alternatives to halide perovskites, based off new concepts on defect tolerance. Materials investigated include BiI3, (CH3NH3)3Bi2I9 and others. He also developed perovskite-silicon tandem photovoltaics, and approaches to monolithically integrate the two sub-cells together. This led to a multi-Institute publication in Nature Energy, and the first entry for perovskite-silicon tandems on the NREL efficiency chart. Hoye also led a multi-Institute effort to discuss the challenges of characterisation and computations on new classes of lead-free perovskite-inspired materials, which was published in Chemistry of Materials. 

Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge (2016-2019)

In 2016, Hoye returned to the University of Cambridge to become an independent Research Fellow, supported by Magdalene College and hosted by Prof. Sir Richard Friend. There, he worked on ultrafast spectroscopy and optoelectronic device development of novel metal-halide semiconductors, including halide elpasolites and perovskite nanoplatelets. He also collaborated with Judith Driscoll on a novel bismuth-based compound, bismuth oxyiodide (BiOI), which he showed to tolerate its most common vacancy and anti-site defects, and for which he devised a new photovoltaic structure that led to efficiencies double previous reports. This work was published in Advanced Materials and featured by Cambridge, the Royal Academy of Engineering, and others. Hoye also collaborated with Erwin Reisner, Sir Tony Cheetham, Neil Greenham, Laura Torrente and Sam Stranks in Cambridge. Externally, he worked with Henry Snaith (Oxford), Jochen Feldmann (LMU-Munich), among others.

In 2018, Hoye became an independent Principal Investigator through the Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship, and in 2019 he became a Fellow of Downing College Cambridge, where he was the inaugural Silverman Research Fellow. Hoye explored the use of BiOI for applications beyond photovoltaics, including photoelectrochemical cells, which was recently published in Nature Materials. He also worked with the Reisner Group to contribute to their efforts on perovskite photocathodes for floating self-driven syngas reactors, which was published in Nature. 

Overall, in the 4 years Hoye was in Cambridge, he supervised 10 PhD students, all of whom have graduated and are now working at Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College, ASML, McKinsey, Helio Display Materials, and the civil service.

Lecturer and Senior Lecturer at Imperial College London (2020 - 2022) 

In 2020, Hoye took up a permanent academic position (Lectureship) at Imperial College, where his labs were based in the new Imperial spoke of the Henry Royce Institute, located at Imperial’s White City Campus. During this time, Hoye supervised students and postdocs at Imperial, as well as students who stayed at Cambridge. It was during this time that he pushed beyond the halide compounds in the exploration of perovskite-inspired materials, and focussed on understanding the effects of carrier-phonon coupling (published in Nature Communications). His group also worked on indoor photovoltaics (published in Advanced Energy Materials and featured on the cover), light-emitting diodes based on perovskite nanosystems (e.g., see JACS paper), radiation detectors and gas sensors. In addition, he established a new collaboration with Peter Petrov, Jerry Heng and Rongjun Chen to develop nanopackaging to enable ambient-stable RNA-based vaccines, funded through a President’s Excellence Fund project (paper published on the cover of Nano Letters). He also secured an MIT-Imperial Seed Grant to establish a new collaboration with Raf Jaramillo (MIT). During his time at Imperial, Hoye also worked closely with Aron Walsh, Sandrine Heutz, Martyn McLachlan, Artem Bakulin, Nicola Gasparini, as well as Laura Herz (Oxford), Peter Müller-Buschbaum (TUM, Germany), David Scanlon (UCL), and others. He interacted strongly with the Henry Royce Institute, Centre for Processable Electronics and London Centre for Nanotechnology. He published invited articles on defect tolerance and novel metal-halide semiconductors in Nature Communications, Joule, Advanced Energy Materials, and others. 

Associate Professor at the University of Oxford (2022 - present)

Hoye took up an Associate Professorship at Oxford in Oct. 2022, as well as a Fellowship at St. John’s College. He was also awarded a Senior Research Fellowship by the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2024, working together with the Science & Technology Facilities Council. His group and labs are based in the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory. So far at Oxford, Hoye's group has developed a BiOI X-ray detector capable of detecting very low dose rates of X-rays (see paper in Nature Communications), as well as self-assembled perovskite nanoplatelets for linearly polarised light emission (see paper in Nature Photonics). He led a roadmap involving >80 PIs from across the UK and beyond to discuss the current status and future directions for photovoltaics, and was invited to write his views on the use of supramolecular complexes for addressing the lead toxicity of halide perovskites (see piece in Nature Sustainability), as well as invited reviews for Chemical Society Reviews, Advanced Materials and others. He is on the editorial advisory board for Advanced Optical Materials, ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, APL Electronic Devices and Nanotechnology.

In addition to his academic role, Hoye is CTO of startup NanoPrint Innovations Ltd., which is commercialising equipment for renewable energy device manufacturing. Hoye was included in the MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 Europe in 2023 (follow this link for news release).

Hoye’s career path has been highly interdisciplinary, and his group has backgrounds in Chemistry, Physics, Materials Science and Engineering. Hoye has been awarded prizes from the Royal Academy of Engineering (2018 Young Engineer of the Year), Royal Society of Chemistry (2024 Beilby Medal and Prize), Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (2021 Rosenhain Medal) and Institution of Engineering and Technology (2019 Sir Henry Royce medal), as well as internationally (2020 WIN Rising Star award, 2023 MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 Europe, 2024 Rising Star of Light) and by Imperial (2021 Outstanding Early Career Researcher). He was also elected a Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining in 2020, and received the prestigious ERC Starting Grant in 2021 (now funded by UKRI). Hoye is ranked by Stanford University in the top 1% of researchers worldwide since 2023.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  • 2024 - 2029: STFC-RAEng Senior Research Fellowship. Held at the University of Oxford
  • 2018 - 2023: Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) Research Fellowship. Held at the University of Cambridge (2018-2019), Imperial College London (2020-2022) and University of Oxford (2022-2023)
  • 2019 - 2020: Silverman Research Fellowship, Downing College Cambridge
  • 2016 - 2019: Thomas Nevile Junior Research Fellowship, Magdalene College Cambridge

2024

2023

2022

2021

  • Rapid, Low-Temperature Growth of p-type Oxides for Photovoltaics and Field-Effect Transistors, Fall MRS, Boston (MA), USA, 2021. Symposium SF01
  • Rapid Vapor-Phase Deposition of Oxide Overlayers on Thermally-Sensitive Device Stacks for Optoelectronics, Fall MRS, Boston (MA), USA, 2021. Symposium EQ17
  • Silver-Bismuth Double Perovskites: Band Gap Tuning and Understanding the Role of Grain Boundaries on Carrier Transport, Spring E-MRS, Strasbourg, France, 2021
  • Photovoltaic Materials Systems for the Energy Transition, JUMP2excel Workshop, University of Manchester, UK, 2021
  • Bismuth Oxyiodide Photovoltaics: Defect Tolerance, Device Engineering and Indoor Light Harvesting, Spring MRS, Seattle (WA), USA, 2021
  • Bismuth-Based Photovoltaics: Band Gap Tuning, Defect Tolerance and Indoor Light Harvesting, London Centre for Nanotechnology, London, 2021
  • Harvesting Ambient Light to Power Electronics: The Potential of Bismuth-Based Solar Cells, MatSoc Talk, Imperial College London, London, 2021

2020

  • Tutorial: Fabrication, Processing and Characterization of Interfacial Layers for Optoelectronic Devices, Materials Research Society (MRS), Virtual Fall MRS Conference, 2020
  • Lead-Free Perovskite-Inspired Materials for Indoor Photovoltaics, RSC Lecture Series, University of Warwick, Warwick, UK, 2020
  • Defect Tolerant Semiconductors for Clean Energy Harvesting: Nanomanufacturing and Emerging 
    Materials, Research Celebration, Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology, University of Waterloo, 
    Waterloo ON, Canada, 2020
  • Bismuth-based semiconductors for solar and indoor light harvesting, Energy Futures Lab, Imperial 
    College London, London, 2020
  • Materials for the Energy Transition - Summary of the Photovoltaics Roadmap, Institute of Physics and 
    the Henry Royce Institute, Webinar, 2020
  • Next-Generation Tandem Photovoltaics: Processing Methods and Discovery of Low-Toxicity Absorbers, 
    Inorganic Materials Symposium, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands, 2020
  • Metal-Halide Perovskites for Optoelectronic Devices, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Texas, 
    USA, 2020
  • Bismuth Oxyiodide Solar Absorbers: Defect Tolerance and Photovoltaic Performance, Condensed 
    Matter Physics Seminar, University of York, York, UK, 2020

2019

  • Opening Up the Processing Window for chemical Vapor Deposited Oxides over Lead-Halide Perovskite Photovoltaics to Achieve Improved Performance, Fall Materials Research Society Meeting & Exhibit, Boston, MA, USA, 2019
  • Understanding and Controlling Non-Radiative Losses in Perovskite Optoelectronics, SolTech Seminar in the Nano-Institute Munich (Physics, Chair for Photonics and Optoelectronics), Munich, Germany, 2019
  • Understanding and Controlling Non-Radiative Losses in Perovskite Optoelectronics, Group of Prof. Dr. Thomas Bein, LMU-Munich, Munich, Germany, 2019
  • Opening Up the Processing Window of Oxides on Perovskite Photovoltaics, Spring European Materials Research Society Meeting & Exhibit, Nice, France, 2019
  • Exploring Bismuth-Based Perovskite-Inspired Materials for Solar Absorbers, London Centre for Nanotechnology Seminar Series, Imperial College London, London, UK

2018 and earlier

  • Bismuth-based Photovoltaics, Annual Showcase for the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in New and Sustainable Photovoltaics, Liverpool, UK, 2018
  • Perovskite-Inspired Materials for Photovoltaics, International Union of Materials Research Societies -International Conference on Electronic Materials (IUMRS-ICEM), Daejeon, Republic of Korea, 2018
  • Defect-Tolerant Semiconductors for Photovoltaics, Fudan University, Shanghai, China, 2018
  • Routes to Efficient, Low-Capex Photovoltaics, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand, 2017
  • Atmospheric Pressure Spatial Atomic Layer Deposition of Thin Films: Reactors, Doping and Devices, Fall European Materials Research Society Meeting & Exhibit, Warsaw, Poland
  • 2025: Lead sorter of the focus topic on halide perovskites at the American Physical Society March Meeting, to be held in Anaheim CA, USA
  • 2024: Co-organiser of Symposium EN05 on Solar Fuel Production, held at the Spring MRS Meeting & Exhibit, Seattle, USA
  • 2023: Co-organiser of Symposium EL02 on Stable Perovskite Optoelectronics, held at the Spring MRS Meeting & Exhibit, San Francisco, USA
  • 2022: Co-organiser of Symposium EQ08 on Quantum Dot Optoelectronics and Low-Dimensional Semiconductor Electronics, held at the Spring MRS Meeting & Exhibit, Honolulu, Hawai’i
  • 2021: Co-organiser of Symposium F on Earth-abundant materials for solar energy conversion, held at the Fall E-MRS Meeting & Exhibit, Warsaw, Poland. Published perspective with other co-organisers in ACS Energy Letters
  • 2020: Co-organiser of Symposium CT02-EL08 on the design and characterisation of perovskites and lead-free materials, held at the Virtual Spring/Fall MRS Meeting & Exhibit. Published invited perspective from symposium in Joule.
  • 2020-2022: Member of the management committee of the CDT in Advanced Characterisation of Materials, which is joint between Imperial, UCL and Trinity College Dublin
  • 2020: Advisor for the Materials for the Energy Transition roadmap (PV section) commissioned by the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and organised by the Henry Royce Institute. Read the photovoltaics roadmap following this link
  • 2020 - present: Editorial board of Nanotechnology
  • 2019: Co-organiser of Symposium H-3 on Advanced Functional Oxides, held at the Materials Research Meeting, Yokohama, Japan
  • 2024 - present: Third year solid-state chemistry for technology (lectures on nanocrystal chemistry)
  • 2024 - present: First year transition metal chemistry
  • 2023: Thin film deposition for OxICFM CDT
  • 2022 - present: Tutorials for first and second year Inorganic Chemistry at St. John's College