At 15:30 on Septemper 20, 2024, Professor Huang Weiyang from Hong Kong Polytechnic University was invited by Professor Huang Hui to give a lecture on " Photofunctional metal-organic materials are used for solar energy conversion" in the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. The lecture was held in Room 304 on the first floor of the Teaching Hall.

      As a key promoter of green and sustainable development of human society and economy, solar energy technology has received extensive attention from all over the world. Organic materials have great potential in solar energy conversion due to their diverse molecular modification, non-pollution, low cost, solution processing and flexible device manufacturing. Prof. Huang Weiyang introduced the development of new metal-organic materials and studied their performance in solar cells and solar evaporators. He first introduced how to explore iridium and platinum-based molecules with high singlet to triplet transitions to improve exciton lifetime and diffusion length, while optimizing the morphology of the active layer, thereby improving the efficiency of organic solar cells. Next, a novel strategy is introduced to integrate multiple charge transfer mechanisms, including metal-to-ligand, ligand-to-metal, ligand-to-ligand, and intermolecular charge transfer, into a metal-organic polymer. This approach aims to design efficient photothermal materials for solar evaporation applications. The development of new metal-organic materials has opened up a meaningful way to improve the solar energy conversion process of photoelectric and photothermal from the perspective of molecular design. Finally, Professor Huang Weiyang had a discussion with the teachers and students on site and received warm responses from them.

      Huang Weiyang is currently the Dean of the Faculty of Science and Chair Professor of the Department of Applied Biology and Chemical Technology at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Ph.D., University of Hong Kong, 1995; From 1996 to 1997, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Texas A&M University in United States and University of Cambridge in United Kingdom. He is currently the Chairman of the Hong Kong Chemical Society; He was an associate editor of Journal of Materials Chemistry C (2013-2022), and is currently the editor-in-chief of Topics in Current Chemistry, an associate editor of Energy Advances, and an editor of the Journal of Organometallic Chemistry. He has long focused on the basic and applied research in the fields of design, synthesis and optoelectronic applications of metal-organic polymers/complexes in inorganic chemistry. With an H-index index of 93, he has won the Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry of United Kingdom, the Royal Society of United Kingdom Chemistry Prize in Transition Metal Chemistry (the first Chinese), the first prize of the Natural Science Award of Universities of the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China (ranked first), the Outstanding Young Chemist Award of the Federation of Asian Chemical Societies, the Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation Science and Technology Innovation Award, the second prize of the State Natural Science Award (ranked first), the Senior Research Scholar Award of the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, the Changjiang Scholar Chair Professor of the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China, and was elected as a foreign member of the European Academy of Sciences in 2023.