Mariano Campoy-Quiles leads a 12-15 people group at the Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona (ICMAB) that has built substantial research efforts in two application areas, solar photovoltaic (light to electric) and thermoelectric (heat to electric) energy conversion. His team uses advanced spectroscopic tools and innovative processing schemes in order to understand and develop technologies based on organic semiconductors. Campoy-Quiles is a physicist from the University of Santiago de Compostela (2000), and has been awarded a PhD in experimental physics from Imperial College London, UK (2005), a Japan Society for Promotion of Science postdoctoral fellowship (2007), a Ramon y Cajal research fellowship (2009), a permanent position as tenured scientist of CSIC (2012), the Most Outstanding Young Researcher in Experimental Physics Award (from the Spanish Royal Society of Physics and Fundación BBVA) (2012), an individual European Research Council Consolidator grant (2014), promotion to research scientist of CSIC (2017), two ERC PoC grants (2020 and 2022) and Margarita Salas Medal (best mentor award) in 2024.
Mariano and his team have advanced a disruptive technology for the high throughput screening of solar cell and thermoelectric materials that combines gradients in the parameters of interest with colocal hyperspectral imaging, which results in more than 50 times faster evaluation of materials, saving up to 90% of the raw chemicals. They are using this technology to develop a-la-carte photovoltaics, i.e. solar cells that are specifically designed to maximize the performance for given applications, such as indoor PV to power IoT devices, semitransparent photovoltaics for agrovoltaics, or high efficiency multijunction (rainbow) solar cells.
His research has been internationally recognised through more than 45 invited presentations at international conferences, and the over 11200/14200 citations (Scopus/Google Scholar, h-index of 48/55) that his 157 papers have already received. He is also co-inventor in eight patents (four licensed), and has recently co-founded the spin-off company Molecular Gate S.L.. From 2019 to 2022 he was the Coordinator of the Materials for Energy and Environment Subarea of the Agencia Estatal de Investigación. He is in the top 2% of scientific researchers worldwide according to the Stanford ranking. He was promoted to Research Professor in April 2022.
Recent publications on photovoltaics
- What Makes Thickness-Tolerant Organic Solar Cells?, X. Rodríguez-Martínez, C. Tormann, M. Sanz-Lleó, B. Dörling, M. Gibert-Roca, A. Harillo-Baños, A. Abat Amelenan Torimtubun, E. Pascual-San-José, J. P. Jurado, L. López-Mir, M. Kemerink, M. Campoy-Quiles Advanced Energy Materials, 2405735 (2025)
- RAINBOW Organic Solar Cells: Implementing Spectral Splitting in Lateral Multi-Junction Architectures, M. Gibert-Roca, M. Casademont-Viñas, Q. Liu, K. Vandewal, A. R. Goñi, & M. Campoy-Quiles*, Advanced Materials, 36, 2212226 (2024)
- Hybrid solar energy device for simultaneous electric power generation and molecular solar thermal energy storage, Z. Wang, H. Hölzel, L. Fernandez, A. S. Aslam, P. Baronas, J. Orrego-Hernández, S. Ghasemi, M. Campoy-Quiles, K. Moth-Poulsen, Joule, 8, 2607 (2024).
- Identifying structure-absorption relationships and predicting absorption strength of non-fullerene acceptors for organic photovoltaics, J. Yan, X. Rodríguez-Martínez, D. Pearce et al. & M. Campoy‐Quiles*, Energy & Environmental Science, 15, 2958-2973 (2022).
- Predicting the photocurrent–composition dependence in organic solar cells Xabier Rodríguez-Martínez, Enrique Pascual-San-José, Zhuping Fei, Martin Heeney, Roger Guimerà and Mariano Campoy-Quiles, Energy & Environmental Science 14, 986-994 (2021).
- Efficient exploration of the composition space in ternary organic solar cells by combining high-throughput material libraries and hyperspectral imaging, A. Harillo-Baños, X. Rodríguez-Martínez & M. Campoy-Quiles, Advanced Energy Materials, 10, 1, 1902417 (2020).
- Exploring the origin of high optical absorption in conjugated polymers, M. S. Vezie, S. Few, I. Meager, G. Pieridou, B. Dörling, R. Shahid A., A. R. Goñi, H. Bronstein, I. McCulloch, S. C. Hayes, M. Campoy-Quiles*, J. Nelson*, Nature Materials, 15, 746–753 (2016)
Recent publications on thermoelectrics
- Microstructural Evolution Dominates the Changes in the Thermal Conductivity of Conjugated Polymers Upon Doping, J. Guo, K. Xu, J. Asatryan, M. J. Alonso-Navarro, O. Zapata-Arteaga, M. Craighero, A. Perevedentsev, R. Kroon, M. M. Ramos, J. L. Segura, J. Martín, C. Müller, J. S. Reparaz, M. Campoy-Quiles, Advanced Functional Materials, e10822 (2025)
- On the thermal conductivity of conjugated polymers for thermoelectrics, X. Rodríguez-Martínez, F. Saiz, et al. & M. Campoy‐Quiles*, Advanced Energy Materials, 14, 2401705 (2024).
- A Universal, Highly Stable Dopant System for Organic Semiconductors Based on Lewis-Paired Dopant Complexes, O. Zapata-Arteaga, A. Perevedentsev, M. Prete, et al & M. Campoy-Quiles*, ACS Energy Letters, 9, 3567 (2024).
- Design Rules for Polymer Blends with High Thermoelectric Performance, O. Zapata-Arteaga, S. Marina, G. Zuo, K. Xu, B. Dörling, L. A. Pérez, J. S. Reparaz, J. Martín, M. Kemerink, M. Campoy-Quiles, Advanced Energy Materials, 12, 2104076 (2022).
- Rapid and high-resolution patterning of microstructure and composition in organic semiconductors using ‘molecular gates’, A. Perevedentsev & M. Campoy-Quiles, Nature Communications, 11, 3610 (2020)
- Reduction of the Lattice Thermal Conductivity of Polymer Semiconductors by Molecular Doping, Osnat Zapata-Arteaga, Aleksandr Perevedentsev, Sara Marina, Jaime Martin, Juan Sebastián Reparaz, & Mariano Campoy-Quiles, ACS Energy Letters, 5, 9, 2972–2978 (2020)
- Farming thermoelectric paper, D. Abol-Fotouh, B. Dörling, O. Zapata-Arteaga, X. Rodríguez-Martínez, A. Gómez, J. S. Reparaz, A. Laromaine, A. Roig, & M. Campoy-Quiles, Energy & Enviromental Science, 12, 716-726 (2019)
