Dr. Vik Dalal
Director, Catron Center for Solar Energy Research
Dr. Dalal was born in Bombay, India in 1944. He received his Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from University of Bombay in 1964 and Ph.D. in EE from Princeton University in 1969. He also holds a M.P.A. degree in Economics from Princeton. He has worked as a research scientist at David Sarnoff Research center, at the Institute of Energy Conversion of University of Delaware and also worked as Vice President for Research at Chronar Corporation, a small solar energy start-up in New Jersey, and at Spire and Polaroid Corporation as Technical Manager. He is currently Whitney Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Associate Chair of ECE department at Iowa State University. He has been at ISU since 1988 and has been Director of MRC since 1999.
Research Interests
Dr. Dalal’s research interests include electronic materials and devices, particularly thin film amorphous and nanocrystalline materials for solar photovoltaic energy conversion and thin film transistor applications. He also investigates fundamental chemistry and physics of plasma deposition of semiconducting materials and how growth chemistry affects electronic and optical properties. Dr. Dalal has over 150 publications in refereed journals and conference proceedings and holds 11 U.S. patents. He is a member of American Physical Society, of IEEE and of Materials Research Society.
Awards & Recognitions
Dr. Dalal holds the Whitney Chair in ECE. He was also awarded the Micron Technology Foundation Faculty Excellence Fellowship Award in 2002. He received the David Boylan award for Faculty Excellence in Research from the College of Engineering at Iowa State in 2005, and the Warren Boast award for excellence in undergraduate teaching from ECE department in 2002. He is a Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE and has been visiting faculty at University of Cambridge in England, at Eindhoven Institute of Technology in Netherlands, at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in India and at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He has given over 30 invited talks at various universities and research institutes in the world.
