Dr. Frédéric Laquai is an adjunct professor of applied physics in the Materials Science and Applied Physics program at KAUST, and head of the Ultrafast Dynamics (UFD) group, focused on the study of fundamental processes defining energy conversion. He joined KAUST in 2015, and served as the Associate Director and later the Interim Director of the former KAUST Solar Center (KSC). In that function, he was responsible for establishing strategic partnerships with academic, industrial, and governmental entities operating within the Kingdom, working on solar energy conversion. Emerging (non-silicon) semiconducting materials are of special interest to Dr. Laquai’s research, especially those capable of being easily and affordably processed at low cost including organic molecules and hybrid perovskites. In addition to his KAUST affiliation, Dr. Laquai holds the Chair of Physical Chemistry and Spectroscopy of Energy Materials at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich.​

Dr. Laquai’s research focuses on investigating the dynamics of fundamental processes inenergy conversion systems and devices, for instance the photon-to-electron conversionin organic and hybrid perovskite solar cells, as well as energy and charge transferprocesses in photocatalytic systems and during photochemical transformations. Hisgroup studies these processes by various steady-state spectroscopies, includingspectroscopic ellipsometry, spectrophotometry, quantum yield measurements, andphotoinduced absorption spectroscopy, as well as transient all-optical and electro-opticaltechniques, for instance time-resolved photoluminescence, ultrafast pump-probetransient absorption, and time-delayed charge collection techniques, with the ultimateaim to reveal efficiency-limiting processes and to develop structure-property relations.​