On April 14, Professor Federico Rosei gave a lecture called “Multifunctional Materials for Emerging Technologies.” Rosei is a fellow of Academia Europaea, Canadian Academy of Engineering, and the Academy of Science of the Royal Society of Canada. He is currently the UNESCO Chair in Materials and Technologies for Energy Conversion, Saving and Storage, the Canada Research Chair in Nanostructured Organic and Inorganic Materials, and the dean of Le Centre Énergie Matériaux Télécommunications de l’INRS at the University of Québec.

Professor Rosei’s research focuses on the properties, control, and application of functional nanomaterials, especially within the building of new energy material with nano-scale microstructures at the atomic and molecular levels.

During the lecture, Professor Rosei introduced the prospects of efficient, sustainable, and renewable energy, summarized the latest developments and challenges in solar energy, and described the bottom-up approach to synthesizing nanostructured materials, which he believes can greatly reduce the production cost of all kinds of energy devices. Rosei also presented the versatility of various materials in different devices, the structure-property relations of those systems, and analyzed new strategies for synthesizing multifunctional nano-level materials for application in the fields of electric and photovoltaic devices.