Laura Herz

Herz studied physics at the University of Bonn and graduated in 1999, first of her class.[2] She worked for two years as an exchange student at University of New South Wales.[3] She joined the University of Cambridge for her doctoral studies, earning a PhD in 2002.[2][4] Here she worked on exciton and polaron dynamics in organic semiconductors.[5]

After her PhD, Herz was appointed a postdoctoral research fellow at St John's College, Cambridge, in 2001.[2] She was awarded an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Advanced Research Fellowship in 2006.[6] Herz became a professor in 2010.[2]

Herz is an expert in perovskite semiconductors.[7] She has researched the origins of the high charge-carrier mobilities in perovskite materials.[8] She demonstrated that their high efficiency in solar cells was due to long charge-carrier diffusion lengths and non-Langevin recombination.[9][10] She identified that perovskite light emission is broad and can be used in Ultrafast lasers.[11] She recognised that the origin of this broadening is Fröhlich coupling to longitudinal optical phonons.[12]

Herz is also interested in self-assembly and nanoscale effects.[13] She works on Biomimetics light harvesting structures made of porphyrin nanorings[14][15] to explore delocalised excited states.[16][17] She is the co-director of the Imperial College London Centre for Doctoral Training in Plastic Electronic Materials.[2]

She appeared on the BBC Radio 4 show In Our Time in 2015.[18] She will join University of Bayreuth in 2018 to deliver a series of lectures.[19]

• Laura Herz publications indexed by Google Scholar