INSPIRE-Grant Report by Cecilia Teixeira da Rocha

From February to May of 2018, I had the opportunity to do a research stay at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, at the research group of Ying Diao. Diao’s group has made significant progress in investigating and explaining the effect of fabrication processes on the morphology of organic polymeric semiconductors in the latest years.

The goal of our collaboration was to assess instabilities that occur during the solution coating of polymer semiconductors. Such instabilities limit the speed of deposition of such materials considerably. During my time there, I had the privilege of working among several students with significant experience in the processing of polymers. I was enabled to have meaningful discussions on how our coating method developed in Dresden could be used to assess the fabrication instabilities. As a product from our collaboration, exciting results, and a publication were generated.