Dr Alison Ciesla

Alison is a Scientia senior lecturer and DECRA fellow in the School of Photovoltaics and Renewable Energy Engineering. Alison works on several large academic and industry collaborative projects focused on understanding and enhancing commercial cell and module reliability, with a special interest in hydrogen behaviour and down conversion approaches. She also teaches the PV manufacturing and technology course for undergrad and postgrad students, and an intensive practical PV fabrication short-course taking students through the process of turning a large area silicon wafer into a solar cell and then mini-module.

Alison completed her PhD in Photovoltaics (PV) in 2017 focusing on reducing recombination and mitigating degradation in commercial solar cells. She is an inventor of >10 related patents and has published >70 research papers. Several of her patents for which she is lead inventor have been commercialised. She was part of the team that commercialised Suntech’s laser doped and plated PLUTO cell technology. She has extensive experience in managing technology transfer and industry collaborations with many larger silicon, wafer, cell and module manufacturers from Asia, Europe and America.

Alison's DECRA fellowship is focused on understanding, predicting and preventing hydrogen related degradation in silicon solar cells. She also leads and contributes to several projects seeking to understand and solve reliability issues in commercial and emerging solar modules. The ultimate goal of Alison's research is to maximise the long-term power output of commercial silicon solar cells through improved reliability.