“Thin-film photovoltaics — the enabling engine for next-generation tandem solar cells ”

Scientia Professor Xiaojing Hao FRSN FAA FTSE
ARC Laureate Fellow and
Deputy Director, ARC Research Hub for Photovoltaic Solar Panel Recycling and Sustainability
School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering
UNSW Sydney

Date and Time: Wednesday, 1 July 2026, 6.00–7.30 pm AEST
Venue: Michael Crouch Room, Mitchell Building, State Library of NSW
Pre-meeting drinks: A cash bar will operate from 5.30 pm
Registration: Please register before 2.00 pm AEST on Wednesday, 1 July
Entry: OGM: Members, $20; Non-members, $30; Students, $0
Enquiries: via email to RSNSW Events
All are welcome

Please click here to register before
2.00 pm AEST on Wednesday, 1 July 2026

Business of the Meeting

The Agenda for the Ordinary General Meeting will be made available on the Meetings page of the website.

Summary: Solar energy is already transforming the world, but meeting the demands of a net-zero future will require photovoltaic technologies that go beyond the limits of silicon alone. Tandem solar cells offer a powerful next step: by combining silicon with a wide-bandgap top cell, they can capture more of the Sun’s spectrum and deliver substantially higher efficiencies. Realising this vision, however, depends on solving a central materials challenge. The top cell must combine high efficiency, long-term stability, low cost, and scalable manufacturing — an exceptionally challenging combination to achieve in any one material system. In this talk, Xiaojing Hao will discuss our advances in earth-abundant thin-film top-cell technologies and show how we develop strategies to enable the next generation of tandem solar cells. Beyond higher efficiency, these developments point to a broader opportunity: more sustainable, affordable, and widely deployable solar energy for the future.

Xiaojing Hao is a Scientia Professor and ARC Laureate Fellow at UNSW, Sydney. She obtained her PhD in the School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering of UNSW in 2010. Her research focus is on low-cost, high-efficiency thin film solar cells and tandem solar cells for both solar photovoltaic and solar fuel applications. She has led her group to achieve several efficiency records on emerging thin film solar cells, including wide bandgap chalcogenides (kesterite, chalcopyrite, antimony chalcogenide) and perovskites.

Professor Hao has published more than 250 peer-reviewed journal papers, including a number of publications in Nature Energy, Nature Photonics, and Energy and Environmental Science. She has been awarded more than 20 prestigious awards/prizes, including the 2020 Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science: Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year, and the 2021 Australian Academy of Science Pawsey Medal. Professor Hao is an elected Fellow of both the Australian Academy of Science and the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering. Most recently, she was the winner of the 2026 Royal Society of NSW Edgeworth David Medal.

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