Juliane Borchert is currently an ESPRC Doctoral Prize Research Assistant at the University of Oxford, where she previously did her PhD in Michael Johnston’s Terahertz Photonics Group and Henry Snaith’s Photovoltaic and Optoelectronic Device Group. The EPSRC Doctoral Prize is a prestigious award, funding Juliane’s research for 6 months after PhD submission. Institutions are encouraged to target their most able students to compete for this award, developing structured mentoring and career development plans with a focus on outreach.

Juliane’s research explores combining vapour deposition techniques with new characterisation methods to further the understanding and increase the performance of perovskite solar cells. Her research profile is growing quickly, with several invited talks in 2019 and she was recently first named author on a journal paper in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

Outreach is a particular interest for Juliane. She is a mentor for www.Cybermentor.de, Germany’s largest online mentoring program for girls in STEM. The mentor serves as a role model for STEM activities via a protected online platform and provides guidance on the choice of subjects and studies. Earlier this year she took over the Twitter account @RealScientists for a week to communicate her research to its 70k+ followers. Real Scientists is a rotational Twitter account featuring scientists, researchers, clinicians, writers, communicators and policy makers talking about their lives and their work. Juliane has also authored a number of articles for wide-interest scientific magazines, most recently “Lise Meitner – the perpetual physics pioneer” in Viewpoint the Magazine of the British Society for the History of Science.

During her PhD studies Juliane attended the SuperSolar Research methods for solar PV Training Day and the SuperSolar sponsored PVSAT conference in 2016.