Sam Stranks

Samuel David Stranks (born 1985) is an award-winning British and Australian scientist. He is Professor of Optoelectronics in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology at the University of Cambridge.
Stranks' research focuses on the development of halide perovskite materials for photovoltaic and light-emitting applications. He is known for first demonstrating the long charge carrier transport lengths in halide perovskites, enabling planar heterojunction solar cell device architectures (cited almost 10,000 times), and developing the first recombination models that are now standards in the field. He has also developed multimodal microscopy approaches to understand local nanoscale material properties, drawing direct insights into performance, structure and instabilities in perovskite materials. He is commercialising the perovskite photovoltaic technology through the startup he co-founded in 2017, Swift Solar, based in San Carlos, developing high-performance perovskite solar cells.. 
Stranks is an Associate Editor at the AAAS journal Science Advances, and sits on the Editorial Advisory Boards for the journals ACS Energy Letters and Advanced Energy Materials. He is also a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge.
==Education==
Stranks was educated at Scotch College in Adelaide, South Australia from 1998-2002. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Adelaide in 2007, majoring in Physics, Theoretical Physics and Chemistry (BSc) and Applied Mathematics and German Studies (BA). His Honours thesis focused on the aggregation of proteins in white wine, working with Professors John Carver and Lorenz von Smekal. Stranks was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship (South Australia, 2008) to undertake his DPhil (PhD) in Condensed Matter Physics at the University of Oxford and St John’s College in 2008 under the supervision of Professors Robin Nicholas and Michael Johnston, which he completed in 2012. His thesis work investigated the wrapping of carbon nanotubes with light-absorbing organic polymers, and charge transfer between the polymer and nanotube to enable new device applications.
==Career and research==
Following his DPhil, Stranks completed two years of postdoctoral research with Professor Henry Snaith at the University of Oxford, whilst holding a Junior Research Fellowship at Worcester College, Oxford. He then received a Marie Curie Fellowship which he held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the laboratory of Professor Vladimir Bulovic (2014-2016). In 2017, he took up a Royal Society University Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge where he founded his research group, Strankslab. Stranks was appointed an Assistant Professor (University Lecturer) in Energy in 2019 and promoted to Professor of Optoelectronics in 2022.
Stranks has co-authored over 210 publications. He has been listed as a Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researcher in two categories every year since 2019.
Stranks’ research has been funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), European Research Council, the Royal Society and the Leverhulme Trust.
==Awards and honours==
In 2017, Stranks was awarded a European Physical Society Early Career Prize for his “seminal contributions to optical and electronic properties of hybrid perovskites, for their use in high-performance, low-cost photovoltaics and broader optoelectronic applications”.
In 2018, Stranks received the Institute of Physics Henry Moseley Medal and Prize for “For his work in pioneering the understanding of the photoexcited states in metal halide perovskite semiconductor materials as used in efficient solar cells, including their diffusion, collection and recombination”.
In 2019, Stranks was awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry Marlow award for “contributions to the development of hybrid perovskite semiconductor devices through fundamental understanding of the relationships between photophysical, chemical and material properties”.
In 2021, Stranks received the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Stuart R. Wenham Young Professional award for being “a pioneer in halide perovskite photovoltaics”. He was also awarded the Phillip Leverhulme Prize in Physics for “work on the optical and electronic properties of emerging semiconductor materials for transformative optoelectronic applications”, and received the 2021 Royal Society of Chemistry Energy and Environmental Science Lectureship for his “pioneering contributions to the field of halide perovskite optoelectronics, including understanding carrier recombination, complex structure-function relationships and device performance”.
Category:1985 births
Category:British Australian
Category:University of Adelaide alumni
Category:Alumni of the University of Oxford
Category:Scientists