News

2025

• HyMaD group leader Prof. Wouter Van Gompel is giving an invited talk in the EL06 symposium of the 2025 MRS Spring meeting in Seattle (April 7-11). He will present recent work of HyMaD and collaborators on the design and application of tailored organic molecules for hybrid perovskites and their devices. He will also chair a session of the symposium focused on the upscaling of perovskite devices.

• 3rd of March - 14th of March: HyMaD group leader Prof. Wouter Van Gompel is visiting the Université de Lorraine for two weeks as an invited visiting professor in the CRM² research group of the Faculty for Sciences and Technology. Two additional weeks are planned in June 2025.

• Congrats to Dr. Arthur Maufort for his second publication as a first author, shared with Dr. Melissa Van Landeghem (OOE group), published in Chemical Science (RSC)! We investigated thermochromism and piezochromism in 2D perovskite materials containing a rigid interdigitated organic bilayer using emission spectroscopy and single-crystal XRD as a function of increasing pressure and reduced temperature. Coincidentally, this is our first publication with the CRM² group from the Université de Lorraine, a partner in EURECA-PRO.

• The HyMaD group is happy to announce that dr. Alfonsina Torimtubun has received a prestigious Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship and will join the group in September of 2025 as a postdoctoral fellow, joint with the OOE group of Prof. Koen Vandewal at the physics department. We look forward to hosting Alfonsina!

• The Weave project INTENSITY, funded by the FWO, F.R.S.-FNRS, and DFG started on the 1st of January of 2025. In this project, HyMaD joins forces with the CMN group of UMons (Dr. David Beljonne and Dr. Claudio Quarti) and KahmannLab at TU Chemnitz (Prof. dr. Simon Kahmann) with the goal of understanding and controlling energy transfer in 2D HOIPs in order to tune their emission properties.

2024

• Congrats to Dr. Arthur Maufort for successfully defending his Ph.D. on the 23rd of October!

• Congrats to Stijn Lenaers for first publication as a first author, published in Advanced Functional Materials (Wiley)! We show that a phosphonic acid derivative with a pyrene organic core can act as a HTL, resulting in inverted perovskite solar cells with enhanced stability, efficiency, and reproducibility as compared to the literature reference 2PACz.

• Congrats to HyMaD Ph.D. student Robin Erkens for successfully obtaining a personal Ph.D. grant from FWO!

• The HyMaD group welcomes a new Ph.D. student, Arne Verding. We wish Arne the best of luck with his research on energy level tuning in 2D perovskites for transistor applications.

• On the 15 of May, the HyMaD group was happy to host Prof. dr. Letian Dou (Purdue University, U.S.) at Hasselt University. Prof. Dou gave a lecture entitled 'Supramolecular Assembly and Light-Emission in Organic Semiconductor-incorporated Perovskite (OSiP)'

• Prof. Wouter Van Gompel and Drs. Arthur Maufort will be representing HyMaD at the MRS Spring conference in Seattle from the 7th till the 9th of May. Both will give a talk in the "QT03: Physics of 2D Halide and Chalcogenides Semiconductors" symposium.

• Prof. Wouter Van Gompel and Drs. Stijn Lenaers will be representing HyMaD at the MATSUS24 conference in Barcelona from the 4th till the 8th of March. Wouter will give a talk in the "#2Dpero" symposium, Stijn will present his work in the poster session.

• Congrats to Arthur Maufort for his first publication as a first author, published in Inorganic Chemistry (ACS)! It presents a detailed study of the non-covalent interactions in 2D HOIPs containing benzotriazole-based organic cations that show interdigitation in the organic bilayer.