A Conversation with Dr. Bernard Kippelen   by Andrew Kerr March 2006 Dr. Bernard Kippelen is a world-renown researcher in Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering whose work in applying the properties of organic compounds to engineering has attracted the attention of the scientific community at large and many major industries. (To save this video to your computer, right-click on this link and "save target as".)

Transcript 00:00 What was it like to grow up in Alsace, France? I grew up in the countryside, attended at first pretty small schools. We didn't have that many options because we just went to the school, the only school in that small town which had approximately 7000 inhabitants. When time came to go to high school I moved to the nearest town, which was fortunately just a few miles away. And that's where I did all of my high school. When I went to the university or to college that's when I moved to Strasbourg, which is approximately 60 miles away from the place where I was born. It's difficult to draw a parallel with the current [U.S.] education, but something that strikes me a lot I think when I listen to students, our [Georgia Tech] students, is that when I went to school we didn't really think about how much money we were going to make. For us it was important to take that opportunity to get an education, because our parents didn't have that chance. Because when they grew up they didn't have the possibility to go and get a graduate degree, not because of their capacity, but just because the family environment would not allow it. [Why didn't the family environment allow this?] I think as far as I'm concerned, in my family it was a lack of resources. Most of my family was in farming or they worked in small local factories, and there was a lack of resources. I think that nowadays of course education is more accessible to a higher number, and my generation had that chance to go to some of these schools, but it was not an opportunity that was given to my parents. I wouldn't say I was a serious student. Actually I got into trouble many times and my teachers would probably say "Wow! Where did he end up?" I was very much into sports. I played soccer of course, like any European boy at the time. But I was also very much into Judo. Very competitive sport, was a way of developing some confidence, but also learning to fail. Losing a competition is good experience because it prepares you to do better next time and to learn to play as in a team is also very important. So sports I think bring a lot of that part of the learning. That social activity is very important. 03:28 What was it like heading off to college on your own for the first time? Oh yes, I remember that time very well! You're 18 and at that time what you dream about is to gain independence, make your own errors and your own accomplishments. And so it was a very interesting time. Not an easy time, because when you are with your parents everything is so easy. You get your laundry done in the morning you open your drawer and you get your clean clothes. When you are on your own you see it with a different view. You have to take care of a lot of other things, like going shopping, cooking your own food, making sure that the heating in your apartment works in the winter and things like that, so it was a great experience. Of course, Strasbourg is a beautiful city, the winters are long and cold, but when spring comes it's a great place. So these are ten years I spent at the univeristy I will never forget. They were wonderful, wonderful years. 04:34 How did you wind up here in the United States? I knew when I was working on my PhD I had a lot of foreigner friends. I was in particular a lot of colleagues who were working in the group of Jean-Marie Lehn who is a very famous chemistry [professor] who got the Nobel Price in chemistry during these years when I was a graduate student in Strasbourg. And I really felt I needed to leave France and discover another country and another culture, and for me coming to the U.S. was a tremendous challenge because of the language barrier, because even though I would write a few publications in English, my oral—my spoken—English was very poor. It was a major challenge to go and live in a new country, learn a different language, and be exposed to a completely different culture. And so the first months were very difficult, but of course with novelty there is always excitement. Arizona was a very special place and beautiful desert with cacti and it was so different from what I was used to, so it was like entering a new world and starting a new life. [It must have felt kind of like stepping into an American western movie, or cowboy movie or something. It's so quintessentially American, cactuses--] Absolutely! That's exactly true. I grew up watching some of these John Wayne movies with the cowboys, and so going to that part of the world and seeing it and being able to hike in these canyons and seeing it for real was incredible. When I grew up I never thought that one day I would be given a chance to go to these places, and visit them, or even live there. Living in the U.S. when I was a little boy was something that never crossed my mind. It seemed so unrealistic, because most of my family always lived very close to where the family came from. So I didn't think I would travel or live in the U.S. and become a U.S. citizen one day. That was just a dream I didn't have when I was a little boy. It just happened, and everyday I still wonder, "How come it happened?" 07:15 You gained a lot of recognition for developing organic solar cells. What does the word "organic" mean in this context? What makes these materials "organic" is that they are based on carbon chemistry. So they are molecules or assemblies of molecules, such as polymers, which are long chains which are comprised mainly of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen. These are the same elements and the same building blocks that are used to make larger molecules in living systems. But the organic materials we work with are fairly small molecular building blocks. The beauty is that in contrast to some of the other traditional materials, such as silicon (modern electronics is based on the semiconductor silicon, and that's an inorganic material), with organic materials you can really change the structure and you can tailor properties. You can change the electrical properties, you can change the optical properties, you can change the mechanical properties, and so these synthetic materials are often referred to as "plastics," so they have become a commodity in today's life. There is no product where we don't have something that's made out of synthetic compounds. Initially a lot of the traditional electronic technologies were based on materials such as silicon. So now we're at the point where in the past ten years new molecules have been developed and they exhibit semi-conducting properties, and so you can use these materials to envision and build various optoelectronic devices, such as light emitting diodes, solar cells, transistors to make electronic circuits, and so on. So there are lots of opportunities, and it's just the beginning. But if you look at the potential of these new technologies...You can print them at low temperature onto almost any substrate, including flexible plastic substrate. So there's a whole technology that people refer to as "printed electronics," which can become a very substantial market. The forecasts are right now: that industry or technology could reach a market size of $30 billion by 2015. So there's a lot of activity, and a lot of excitement. 09:59 In one article I read online you expressed a desire for your solar cells to reach 5% efficiency. What is "efficiency" in this context? The power conversion efficiency, that percentage basically tells you how much of the optical power that we get from the sun gets converted into electrical power. So on a sunny day, typically if you place a detector outside in the sun it will measure the optical power, and it's approximately a hundred milliwatts per square centimeter. So if you place your solar cell in that illumination you will produce that power multiplied by the efficiency. So if you have a 5% efficient cell you're going to produce 5 milliwatts per square centimenter of solar cell. 10:48 Your work seems especially interdisciplinary. How did you put the pieces of these different scientific disciplines together? I was trained in solid state physics, that was my backgroud, and so I didn't learn much about chemistry and organic molecules during my training. When I started as a scientist, I was working on inorganic semiconductors, so more traditional materials. When I went to Arizona for my postdoc I was sharing a laboratory with a Japanese visiting scientist who was a chemist, and he was working on the first generation of photo refractive molecules. I started talking to him simply because were sharing the same laboratory and the same office. I really got very excited by these prospects and decided to switch my research interests and objectives at that time. I went to see my advisor and said look, I really like what Kazutaka [Tamura] is working on, and I think that with my background I can help him and I can make some contributions. That's how I got started. But after a few months or maybe a year of working with these materials I didn't have any results at all, nothing significant that could be published. It was really hard. And a lot of my colleagues were saying, "You're wasting your time with these compounds; they will never be stable; they're gonna work in the laboratory at the time of an experiment, but you will never build a technology out of this," and I remember these were very difficult times where I had to choose between really dropping what I had been investing on for a year, or persevere and not give up. So I decided to persevere for another year. And then all these efforts started to pay off, to pay back, and a few years later we had developed some of the most efficient materials for holographic storage. Our research was featured on the cover page of Physics Today, which is the monthly magazine of the American Physical Society [Dr. Kippelen later clarifies: "Physics Today is published by the American Institute of Physics AND is a monthly magazine that members of the American Physical Society receive for free as part of their membership. My statement was misleading since the American Physical Society also published a monthly newsletter that is called APS NEWS."], so yeah it takes some courage sometimes to try to do research in new areas because you never know if it's going to work or if you're going to fail. 13:13 How did you come to bring your research to Georgia Tech? I was part of a group of colleagues and we were all working at the University of Arizona. One of the visions we had was to establish a center for organic photonics and electronics, which really provided an environment where you could integrate all aspects from the synthesis, the design and modeling of new molecules, to the charicaterization of these materials, to the insertion of these materials into new devices, to system engineering. And so Georgia Tech was one of these places who shared this same vision, and I guess that's how we ended up here established COPE [this stands for "Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics"], that center, in order to be able to implement that vision. 14:03 What advice would you give to high school students watching this? I think my message to students who listen to that interview is that set your expectations or set your dreams very high, because sometimes life brings you rewards that you do not always imagine when you are working on your homework and you say why am I working that hard, I could be somewhere else having fun with my friends, but when it comes to your education I think you will see that maybe some unexpected rewards will come later in life, and you will always remember these times when you spent some time working and studying and really try to if you have the opportunity and the mind to study try to push it as a far as you can.