Nam-Gyu Park is professor and Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU) fellow at the School of Chemical Engineering, SKKU, South Korea. He received his PhD in chemistry from Seoul National University, South Korea, in 1995. He worked as postdoctoral researcher at the Institut de Chimie de la Matiere Condensee de Bordeaux–Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (ICMCB-CNRS), France, from 1996 to 1997 and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, USA, from 1997 to 1999. He was principal scientist at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), South Korea, from 2000 to 2005 and director of the Solar Cell Research Center at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), South Korea, from 2005 to 2009. Prof. Park was selected as one of the New Class of Nobel Prize–Worthy Scientists in September 2017 and has received many awards, including the Scientist Award of the Month from the Ministry of Science and Technology in 2008 and the ACS-KCS Excellence Award from the Korean Chemical Society in 2018. He has more than 250 refereed publications and more than 70 patents to his name, with an H-index of 77. He is a pioneer of solid-state perovskite solar cells, and since 1997, he has been working on high-efficiency mesoscopic nanostructured solar cells.
Hiroshi Segawa is professor at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Tokyo, Japan. He obtained his PhD in molecular engineering from Kyoto University, Japan. He joined the Graduate School of Engineering, Kyoto University, as research associate in 1989 and moved to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo, as associate professor in 1995. From 2009 to 2014, he was the core researcher of the Funding Program for World-Leading Innovative R&D on Science and Technology for the development of organic photovoltaics toward a low-carbon society. Since 2015, he is a project leader working on the development of perovskite-type innovative solar cells with low production cost. Prof. Segawa is a member of the Science Council of Japan. He has received many awards, including the Second Solar Award of Japan (Technology Section) in 2013 and the Platinum Prize of Tanaka Noble Metal Group in 2014. His research interests include perovskite solar cells, energy-storable solar cells, photoenergy conversion, and molecular systems.