Deirdre O'Carroll

The O’Carroll Research Group is focused on nanoscale engineering of the efficiency and direction of light generating and light harvesting processes in photonic devices which employ organic polymeric semiconductor materials and plasmonic nanostructures. For light generating devices, plasmonic nanoantennas are investigated as a means to enhance the efficiency, rate and directionality of low luminescence quantum efficiency, high-mobility conjugated polymer materials such as the widely studied poly(3-hexylthiophene). This is an original approach to solving one of the main challenges associated with using organic materials in opto-electronic devices – i.e., high charge carrier mobility organic materials predominantly exhibit low luminescence quantum efficiency due to intermolecular interactions. For light harvesting devices such as bulk-heterojunction photovoltaics, nanostructured optically-active noble metal electrodes are designed and implemented to induce a number of beneficial photonic effects to the device behaviour that have the potential to push the technology closer to competitive solar power conversion efficiencies.

•    2017 ACS Polymer Materials Science and Engineering (PMSE) Young Investigator
•    2016 NSF CAREER Award
•    2013 Selected as Rutgers’ nominee for the Packard Foundation Fellowship
•    2012 Rutgers’ Research Council Award
•    2008-2010 EC Marie Curie International Fellowship
•    2008 1st Place, Tyndall Best Paper Competition.
•    2007 1st Place, Inaugural Tyndall Postgraduate Poster Competition.
•    2002-2005 IRCSET NSOM Postgraduate Research Scholarship

•    Materials Research Society
•    SPIE
•    American Chemical Society
•    IEEE

•    Ph.D., Microelectrical Engineering, University College Cork, Ireland, 2008
•    B.E., (First Class Honors), Electrical Engineering, University College Cork, Ireland, 2002

 Training
•    Postdoctoral Fellow: Nanostructures Laboratory, University of Strasbourg and CNRS, 2010
•    Postdoctoral Scholar: Applied Physics and Materials Science, California Institute of Technology, 2007-2009