From Oxford & Cambridge to market: Transforming display technology

A Fellow of the Royal Society, Henry Snaith is professor at the University of Oxford’s Clarendon Laboratory, where he leads a research group in organic, hybrid and perovskite optoelectronic devices.

Supervised by Professor Sir Richard Friend, Henry gained his PhD at the University of Cambridge for research into organic photovoltaics. He then spent two years at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne as a post-doc, researching solid-state, “hybrid” solar cells. He took up his faculty position in Oxford in 2007, where he has conceptualised and pioneered highly efficient photovoltaic and optoelectronic devices based on metal-halide perovskites.

In 2010, Henry founded Oxford Photovoltaics Ltd, which is now successfully commercialising perovskite solar technology and where he is Chief Scientific Officer. He co-founded Helio Display Materials Ltd., in 2016.

Henry has won numerous accolades and awards for his research and discoveries in the field of metal halide perovskite optoelectronics. In addition to being listed as Clarivate Citation Laureate, he has the Patterson Medal from the Institute of Physics, has been listed in Nature’s Ten People Who Mattered, gained the Materials Research Society’s Outstanding Young Investigator Award and the EU-40 Materials Prize from the European Research Society. In 2015, he earned second place as one of the World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds, in October 2017, was awarded the Institute of Physics James Joule Medal and Prize for the discovery and development of organic-inorganic metal-halide perovskite solar cells, and in 2018, he received the inaugural UK Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists.

World-renowned for research into physics and engineering of carbon-based semiconductors, and Cavendish Professor at the University of Cambridge, Sir Richard Friend pioneered the study of organic polymers and, more recently, the field of perovskites. His work has been applied to the development of polymer field effect transistors, light emitting diodes, photovoltaic diodes, optically pumped lasing and directly printed polymer transistors.

In 1992, Sir Richard co-founded Cambridge Display Technology Ltd (CDT) as a spin-out from the University of Cambridge, after discovering how to create organic electroluminescence from polymers (P-OLEDS). CDT was floated on NASDAQ in 2004 and was acquired by Sumitomo Chemical Company in September 2007.

Sir Richard was knighted for Services to Physics in 2003, is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering and Laureate of the Millennium Prize for Technology. In 2024, Professor Sir Richard Friend was awarded the prestigious Isaac Newton Medal by the Institute of Physics. He is also recognised for his work as a Foreign Member of the US National Academy of Engineering and as a winner of the Israel Institute of Technology Harvey Prize. In addition to numerous accolades and awards, he has produced in excess of 1000 publications and has registered over 60 patents.