Keith Barnham is Emeritus Professor of Physics and Senior Research Investigator in the Physics Department at Imperial. He leads the Quantum Photovoltaics Group which for 15 years has pioneered the application of quantum wells and quantum dots to photovoltaics publishing over 100 papers in this area and holding a number of patents. The group was shortlisted for the prestige international award the “Eni Italgas Prize for Energy and Environment” in 2006. They presented 4 oral papers at the recent World PV conference, one of which was chosen as a conference highlight. At the previous World conference in Osaka a group presentation received a prize for its outstanding contribution to PV.
Having been a Professor of Physics since 1997, and Acting Head of the Experimental Solid State group in 2004 he took early retirement in 2005 to concentrate on the research and its commercial exploitation in two spin-out companies, Solarstructure and QuantaSol which are being incubated with help from Imperial Innovations and the Carbon Trust. He started his research career as an Experimental Particle Physicist at the University of Birmingham, CERN Geneva, Berkeley California and Imperial, co-authoring over 100 scientific papers in this field. He then spent 5 years as Senior Tutor in the Physics Department. This was followed by a Royal Society/SERC Industrial Fellow at Philips Research Laboratories studying Low Dimensional Structures before joining the Experimental Solid State Physics group at Imperial in 1986.