Top German scientist reverses his own brain drain

Eike Weber: back home.

His move comes three years after Weber set up the German Scholars Organisation to foster links between German scientists working abroad and the land of their birth, and make it easier for those who wished to move back home to do so.

A physicist by training, Weber began his scientific career at the University of Cologne, where he obtained his doctorate in 1976 with a thesis on “Point Defects in Deformed Silicon”.

After conducting postdoctoral research at the State University of New York, Albany, and at Lund University in Sweden, he returned to Cologne ,where he qualified as a professor, before brain draining to California in 1983 to teach Materials Science at the University of California in Berkeley.

Weber has earned an international reputation for his research on defects in silicon and semiconductors such as gallium arsenide and gallium nitride. In 1997 he was a founding member of the Silicon Wafer Engineering and Defect Science consortium, whose members today comprise twelve firms and nine university groups all over the world.

Over the past few years, Weber’s research group has specialised in material defects in solar silicon. They discovered that the critical factor in contaminated silicon is not how many transition metals it contains, but how widely those metals are distributed. Even cells with a high metal content still had a good electricity yield if the metals were concentrated in only a few places.

This gave Weber the idea of using “dirty” silicon for the manufacture of solar cells. Until now, the manufacture of solar cells has required the same kind of high-purity, expensive silicon that is produced for the chip industry. “Using dirty silicon could enable the global solar energy industry to take a quantum leap forward,” is how Weber describes the implication of this concept.

The industry could cut costs significantly and would be able to circumvent the shortage of high-purity silicon.

Weber is convinced that the dirty silicon can be manipulated by heat treatment in such a way as to concentrate the metals it contains into just a few clusters, and he intends this to be the focus of research in Freiburg.

But he also believes that the ISE will make progress in other aspects of solar energy too, which was what attracted him to the job in Freiburg: “I am looking forward to being able to influence the propagation of solar energy at a decisive juncture, particularly as the next ten years will be very exciting in this respect.”

Concurrently with his appointment as director of the Fraunhofer ISE, Weber has been appointed to the Chair of Applied Physics, Solar Energy, at the University of Freiburg.

For someone who has been part of the American research system, with the substantially higher salaries that it offers, it is not easy to return to Germany. Weber is well acquainted with the problem. He has committed himself wholeheartedly to building bridges between Germany and the US, founding the German Scholars Organisation in 2003.

This association of German scientists living and working abroad aims to foster contacts with the “old country” and thus facilitate the scientists’ return to Germany. Now the president of the organisation has himself followed the call of his native country.