Alison Ciesla

Alison is a Scientia lecturer and DECRA fellow in the School of Photovoltaics and Renewable Energy Engineering at UNSW Sydney. She completed her PhD in Photovoltaics (PV) in 2017 focusing on reducing recombination and mitigating LID. She is an inventor of >10 related patents and has published >50 research papers. Several of her patents for which she is lead inventor have been commercialised. She was part of the team that commercialised Suntech’s laser doped and plated PLUTO cell technology. She has extensive experience in managing technology transfer and industry collaborations with many larger silicon, wafer, cell and module manufacturers from Asia, Europe and America.

Alison's DECRA fellowship is focused on understanding hydrogen behaviour in silicon cells and its contribution to LeTID as a way to predict and prevent such degradation. She also leads and contributes to several projects seeking to understand and solve reliability issues in commercial solar modules. The ultimate goal of Alison's research is to maximise the long-term power output of commercial silicon solar cells through improved reliability.