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The Age Of Energy
We are living in the Age of Energy. The fossil fuel based economy of the present must give way to the renewable energy based economy of the future. Getting there is the grandest challenge humanity faces. Chemistry can help meet this challenge by discovering new materials that efficiently harvest solar radiation, store energy for later use, and reconvert the stored energy when needed.
The Clean Energy Project is the world’s largest distributed computing project for calculating the properties of candidate molecules for organic solar cells. It uses computational chemistry and the willingness of people to help look for the best molecules possible for: organic photovoltaics to provide inexpensive solar cells, polymers for the membranes used in fuel cells for electricity generation, and how best to assemble the molecules to make those devices. By helping them search combinatorially amongst thousands of potential systems, you can contribute to this effort.
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Meet The Team & Learn About The Project!
This Perspective introduces the Harvard Clean Energy Project (CEP), a theory-driven search for the next generation of organic solar cell materials. We give a broad overview of its setup and infrastructure, present first results, and outline upcoming developments. CEP has established an automated, high-throughput, in silico framework to study potential candidate structures for organic photovoltaics.
The current project phase is concerned with the characterization of millions of molecular motifs using first-principles quantum chemistry. The scale of this study requires a correspondingly large computational resource, which is provided by distributed volunteer computing on IBM’s World Community Grid. The results are compiled and analyzed in a reference database and will be made available for public use. In addition to finding specific candidates with certain properties, it is the goal of CEP to illuminate and understand the structureproperty relations in the domain of organic electronics. Such insights can open the door to a rational and systematic design of future high-performance materials. The computational work in CEP is tightly embedded in a collaboration with experimentalists, who provide valuable input and feedback to the project.
In this segment of The Organic View Radio Show, host, June Stoyer talks to Dr. Aspuru-Guzik about The Harvard Clean Energy Project.
Bio: Alán Aspuru-Guzik
Professor Alán Aspuru-Guzik is currently Associate Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University, where he started his independent career in 2006. Alán received his undergraduate degree in Chemistry from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1999. He received the Gabino Barreda Medal from UNAM, which prizes the top achiever in each field of study. After receiving his PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004, under Professor William A. Lester, Jr., he was a postdoctoral scholar in the group of Martin Head-Gordon at UC Berkeley from 2005-2006.
Professor Aspuru-Guzik carries out research at the interface of quantum information and chemistry. In particular, he is interested in the use of quantum computers and dedicated quantum simulators for chemical systems. He has studied the role of quantum coherence in excitonic energy transfer in photosynthetic complexes, and developed methodology for studying the spectroscopy of molecules in nanoscale environments. He and his group recently developed a density functional theory for open quantum systems. He leads the Clean Energy Project: a distributed computing effort for screening renewable energy materials.
In 2009, Professor Aspuru-Guzik recently received the DARPA Young Faculty Award, the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar award and the Sloan Research Fellowship. In 2010, he received the Everett-Mendelsson Graduate Mentoring Award and received the HP Outstanding Junior Faculty award by the Computers in Chemistry division of the American Chemical Society. In the same year, he was selected as a Top Innovator Under 35 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Technology Review magazine.