Director - Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE
After 23 years of research in the USA, most recently as a professor at the University of California in Berkeley, Eicke Weber has returned to Germany. He succeeds Professor Joachim Luther, who has headed Europe’s largest solar energy research institute since 1993 and is now retiring.
Eicke R. Weber is a physicist and has taught Materials Science at the University of California in Berkeley since 1983. He obtained his doctorate in 1976 with a thesis on “Point Defects in Deformed Silicon”. After conducting postdoctoral research at the State University of New York, Albany, USA and at Lund University in Sweden, he returned to Cologne where he qualified as a professor in 1983, publishing a fundamental study of “Transition Metals in Silicon” which is frequently cited in literature to this day. That same year he joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was appointed to the interdisciplinary Chair of Nanoscale Science and Engineering Graduate Group in March 2004.
Weber has earned an international reputation as a materials researcher for defects in silicon and III-V semiconductors such as gallium arsenide and gallium nitride. He and his research group have published over 580 papers, and he is co-editor of the Academic Press book series “Semiconductors and Semimetals”. In 1997 he was a founding member of the “Silicon Wafer Engineering and Defect Science” consortium, whose members today comprise twelve firms and nine university groups all over the world. Over the last few years, Weber’s research group in Berkeley gained important insights into material defects in solar silicon. Eicke Weber intends to pursue this focus of research in Freiburg. But he also believes that the ISE can be instrumental in achieving significant progress in other fields of solar energy, too, over the next few years. This was what attracted him to the job in Freiburg: “I am looking forward to being able to influence the propagation of solar energy at a decisive juncture, particularly as the next ten years will be very exciting in this respect.”
Eicke R. Weber is a physicist and has taught Materials Science at the University of California in Berkeley since 1983. He obtained his doctorate in 1976 with a thesis on “Point Defects in Deformed Silicon”. After conducting postdoctoral research at the State University of New York, Albany, USA and at Lund University in Sweden, he returned to Cologne where he qualified as a professor in 1983, publishing a fundamental study of “Transition Metals in Silicon” which is frequently cited in literature to this day. That same year he joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was appointed to the interdisciplinary Chair of Nanoscale Science and Engineering Graduate Group in March 2004.
Weber has earned an international reputation as a materials researcher for defects in silicon and III-V semiconductors such as gallium arsenide and gallium nitride. He and his research group have published over 580 papers, and he is co-editor of the Academic Press book series “Semiconductors and Semimetals”. In 1997 he was a founding member of the “Silicon Wafer Engineering and Defect Science” consortium, whose members today comprise twelve firms and nine university groups all over the world. Over the last few years, Weber’s research group in Berkeley gained important insights into material defects in solar silicon. Eicke Weber intends to pursue this focus of research in Freiburg. But he also believes that the ISE can be instrumental in achieving significant progress in other fields of solar energy, too, over the next few years. This was what attracted him to the job in Freiburg: “I am looking forward to being able to influence the propagation of solar energy at a decisive juncture, particularly as the next ten years will be very exciting in this respect.”