Steve Barlow received his BA and D. Phil. degrees in Chemistry from the University of Oxford in 1992 and 1996 respectively. He has subsequently been a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech, a temporary faculty member at Oxford, and a research scientist at the University of Arizona and the Georgia Institute of Technology, joining RASEI in July 2021. His broad research interests concerns the synthesis and study of organic and metal-organic compounds with electronic, optical, and/or magnetic properties that have relevance to materials, either directly as compounds that can be used in application-related demonstrations, or indirectly, as model compounds. Examples of specific areas of current interest include:
• highly reducing or oxidizing organic and metal-organic molecules as n- or p-dopants for organic semiconductors and as redox agents for chemistry, particularly examples that are relatively inert under atmospheric conditions due to coupling of the electron-transfer process to bond-breaking/-forming reactions;
• understanding how the chemical structure of organic cations influences that of lead-halide perovskites and related materials;
• (metal-)organic surface modification of inorganic materials such as metal oxides in order to control properties such as work function, wettability, and electron-transfer chemistry; and
• development of polymeric, molecular, and monolayer-based interlayers for organic and lead-halide perovskite solar cells and light-emitting diodes.
His research is highly disciplinary, involving organic, inorganic, and physical chemistry, as well as extensive collaboration with other chemists, materials scientists, engineers, and physicists.