Pascal Friederich
December 2019 - now
Juniorprofessor, Artificial Intelligence for Materials Science
Group website
Institute of Theoretical Informatikcs, Institute of Nanotechnology
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
July 2018 - December 2019
Postdoctoral Researcher, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow
University of Toronto, Canada
April 2018 - June 2018
Postdoctoral Researcher, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow
Harvard University, USA
October & November 2017
Visiting researcher, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Thanks to a DFG internationalization grant, I was able to visit the research group of Jean-Luc Brédas at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, USA. It was the first time I traveled outside of Europe, and it was a great experience! Atlanta is an intersting city and Georgia Tech is an exciting place to do research.
January 2017 - March 2018
Postdoctoral Researcher, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
To apply for postdoctoral positions and fellowships in North America, I needed some time after my PhD. During that time, I contacted few interesting and fitting groups mostly in the US, to find an exciting new research topic for my postdoc. I applied for funding through the Marie-Sklodowska Curie global fellowship and the DFG global postdoctoral fellowship programme. In addition to that, I applied for a travel grant to visit the group of Jean-Luc Brédas at Georgia Tech, where I spent two months in 2017, followed by a trip to Boston where I attended the MRS Fall Meeting 2017 and met my postdoc supervisor Alán Aspuru-Guzik for the first time in person. A blog post about my experiences in contacting potential research groups and applying for postdoctoral fellowships will follow soon.
January 2014 - December 2016
Doctor of physics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
PhD Thesis: Simulation of charge transport in amorphous organic semiconductors
Institute of Nanotechnology, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Wenzel, Prof. Dr. Gerd Schön
March 2012 - December 2013
Master of physics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
A lecture by Wolfgang Wenzel and Velimir Meded on "Simulation of Nanoscale Systems" sparked my interest in numerical simulations of organic semiconductors. I joined the lab of Wolfgang Wenzel and started my Master's project. The initial topic was to establish and automate a multiscale simulation workflow to compute charge transport in amorphous organic semiconductors. Soon after I started, I began to work on a piece of code that used density functional theory calculations to estimate the energy level distribution ("energy disorder") of molecular systems. Together with Velimir Meded (who was subgroup leader in Wolfgang Wenzel's group at that time) and Franz Symalla (diploma student and later PhD student), we developed the Quantum Patch method, which couples DFT calculations in a self-consistent way. This enabled us to include explicit charge carriers and their polarization effects in our calculations of energy disorder.
Master's Thesis: Simulation of energetic disorder in amorphous organic semiconductors
Institute of Nanotechnology, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Wenzel, Prof. Dr. Gerd Schön, Dr. Velimir Meded
October 2008 - February 2012
Bachelor of physics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
I started studying physics in Karlsruhe in October 2008. Being interested in renewable energy and photovoltaics, I decided to join the lab of Alexander Colsmann. During my Bachelor's project on organic solar cells, I did experimental work in the cleanroom, including solution processing and characterization of organic solar cells.
Bachelor's Thesis: The effect of alkyl side-chains on the optoelectronic properties of poylmer/fullerene solar cells
Institute of Light Technology, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Heinz Kalt, Priv.-Doz. Dr. Michael Hetterich, Prof. Dr. Uli Lemmer, Dr. Alexander Colsmann