Dane deQuilettes

Seeking better materials to improve solar energy

- Eric Sullivan

FIELD // ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING Princeton University AGE 36

In his second year of graduate school, Dane deQuilettes thought something was wrong with his microscope. He had just returned to the University of Washington from the University of Oxford, where he had learned to make perovskites—polycrystalline solar materials that can be printed like ink—and he was eager to see what the film would reveal. But the image looked wrong. He was convinced he had botched the calibration and spent days troubleshooting in secret.

The microscope was fine. He discovered that the problem was the material.