It has been a very productive year for our 2015 grant recipient, Nimrat Obhi, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto in the Seferos Research Group in the Department of Chemistry. Nimrat has been busy pursuing her research investigating the use of organic polymers with unique 2-dimensional architectures for use in organic solar cells. Her project has led to some exciting and promising results leading to a related project, which she is working on in conjunction with her original ideas.

Here are some of Nimrat’s accomplishments over the past year:

• Initial results in fabricating the polymers for this project were positive, and the full synthesis for a wide range of 2-dimensional polymers is currently being optimized with help from an undergraduate student that Nimrat is mentoring. Lots of work has gone into developing a reproducible method for this synthesis, and fabrication of many different substrates is currently underway!
• Light absorption studies indicate that these polymers are suitable for implementation in the active layer of organic solar cells, and various characterization experiments indicate that they should have the expected 2-dimensional composition.
• Synthesizing the initial set of 2-dimensional polymers led to the development of an interesting project involving an alternative synthesis of the same polymers. These new polymers are hypothesized to have interesting 3-dimensional architectures, which could prove very important for increased charge transport and light absorption!

In addition to the points outlined above, Nimrat has currently been optimizing the synthesis of these 3-dimendional substrates, while working on the fabrication of her original 2-dimensional polymers and is expecting to publish her results in 2017.

We at the foundation thank Nimrat for her time to update us on the progress of this exciting project and making us proud to be a part of her exciting research!