Faculty Profiles
Darren Lipomi
Professor, NENG
Associate Dean for Students, Jacobs School of Engineering
Mechanically compliant organic electronic materials and devices, including stretchable polymer-based solar cells and skin-like sensors, and unconventional, green approaches to nanomanufacturing.
Professor Lipomi's research interests include molecularly stretchable electronics; ultra-thin, ultra-compliant, and inexpensive photovoltaics; optical and electronic nanostructures; plasmonic and electronic methods of chemical sensing; engineering and synthesis of complex molecular architectures to achieve new macroscopic functionality; new methods of fabricating nanostructures; and in unconventional approaches to saving and generating energy.
Capsule Bio:
Darren Lipomi earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University in June, 2010. At Harvard, he worked in the laboratory of Professor George M. Whitesides in the areas of materials chemistry; nanofabrication, including soft lithography and nanoskiving; materials for optics and electronics; chemical synthesis; and organic photovoltaics. From August 2010 to July 2012, he was a US Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University, department of Chemical Engineering, in the Laboratory of Professor Zhenan Bao, where his work focused on organic materials for mechanically compliant photovoltaic cells and electronic skin. He earned a certificate ("mini MBA") from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business Program in Innovation and Entrepreneurship (now Stanford Ignite).
He was appointed in July 2012 as member of the faculty in the Department of NanoEngineering at UC San Diego. He is an author of thirty publications (including sixteen first-author, seven corresponding-author, and three cover articles) and has been supported by three competitive fellowships, including the Beckman Scholars Program (at Boston University), the ACS Division of Organic Chemistry Fellowship (at Harvard), and the US Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Fellowship (at Stanford).
At UCSD, he has received the AFOSR Young Investigator Program award and the NSF BRIGE award. His research has been covered by around one hundred news organizations and sci-tech websites, including CNN, Nature, Popular Science, Wired, Physics World, CNET, PCWorld, and Gizmodo. As a faculty member at UCSD, he earned the AFOSR Young Investigator Program and NSF BRIGE Awards.
