Alessandro is a material scientist with broad experience in photovoltaic cells and in the deposition and characterization of nanowires. He joined INL in 2019 as a European Commission Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Individual Fellow (IF) with a proposal titled CIGNUS – CuInGaSe Nanowires Under the Sun. His work is focused on developing novel nanostructures based on CIGS materials towards solar cells application.

Before joining INL, he obtained a BSc from the University of Milano – Bicocca in Italy, and an MSc in the same institution with a master thesis on “Thermoelectric properties of semiconductor nanowires”, carried out in the group of Prof. Gerhard Abstreiter at TU Muenchen (Germany). Afterwards, he obtained a PhD at the Eindhoven University of Technology (The Netherlands) under the supervision of Prof. Erik Bakkers, Prof. Jos Haverkort, and Dr Erik Garnett, with a thesis titled “Growth of nanowire solar cells”. He then moved to NREL in Colorado, USA in 2017, to work on III-V solar cells in the groups of Dr Aaron Ptak and Dr John Geisz, developing growth of PV devices on reused substrates and novel front contact metallization schemes.

• Cavalli, A.; Wang, J.; Esmaeil Zadeh, I.; Reimer, M. E.; Verheijen, M. A.; Soini, M.; Plissard, S. R.; Zwiller, V.; Haverkort, J. E. M.; Bakkers, E. P. A. M.
  High Yield Growth and Characterization of InP p-n Diode Nanowires
  Nano Letters, 2016, 16, 3071-3077

• Cavalli, A.; Cui, Y.; Kölling, S.; Verheijen, M. A.; Plissard, S. R.; Wang, J.; Koenraad, P. M.; Haverkort, J. E. M.; Bakkers, E. P. A. M.
  Influence of Growth Conditions on the Performance of InP Nanowire Solar Cells
  Nanotechnology, 2016, 27, 45400

• Mann, S. A.; Oener, S. Z.; Cavalli, A.; Haverkort, J. E. M.; Bakkers, E. P. A. M.; Garnett, E. C.
  Quantifying Losses and Thermodynamic Limits in Nanophotonic Solar Cells
  Nature Nanotechnology, 2016, 11, 12, 1071-1075

• Black, L.; Cavalli, A.; Verheijen, M. A.; Haverkort, J. E. M.; Bakkers, E. P. A. M.; Kessels, W. M. M.
  Effective Surface Passivation of InP Nanowires by Atomic-Layer-Deposited Al2O3 with POx Interlayer
  Nano Letters, 2017, 17, 6287-6294

• Oener, S. Z.; Cavalli, A.; Sun, H; Haverkort, J. E. M.; Bakkers, E. P. A. M.; Garnett, E. C.
  Charge carrier-selective contacts for nanowire solar cells
  Nature Communications, 2018, 9(1), 3248