Paul W. Leu, PhD

Associate Professor B.P. America Faculty Fellow

1004 Benedum Hall | 3700 O’Hara Street | Pittsburgh, PA 15261 C: 412-606-1275

pleu@pitt.edu www.lamp.pitt.edu

Biographical Sketch

Paul W. Leu is the director of the Laboratory for Advanced Materials at Pittsburgh (LAMP). He received his PhD at Stanford University and was a postdoctoral research fellow at University of California, Berkeley. He has received the 2012 Oak Ridge Powe Junior Faculty, 2016 UPS Minority Advancement Award, and the 2016 NSF CAREER Award. His research has been featured in Industrial Engineering Magazine, Pittsburgh NPR, and Pittsburgh Magazine.

Dr. Paul W. Leu’s research group focuses on combining simulations and experiments to discover and evaluate new advanced materials for optoelectronic devices and antibacterial surfaces. His lab simulates and fabricates various nanomaterials, such as metal nanomeshes, nanosphere coatings, nanostructured hazy glass, nanowires, and nanoholes for applications such as solar cells. His research seeks to understand the various process – structure – property relationships of these nanomaterials to enable functionalities such as nanophotonic light scattering, plasmonic light trapping, antireflection, self-cleaning, and high durability.

Experiments are complimented by simulations, which synergistically explore the optical and electronic properties. This includes electrodynamic simulations of how structures interact with light at sub-wavelength scales and transport simulations to study doping and recombination. These simulations are integrated with optimization and machine learning algorithms for rapid design and inverse design algorithms to determine processes for fabricating these structures. More recently, LAMP has worked with various researchers at UPMC to evaluate new nanostructured surfaces for anti-biofouling (preventing adhesion), antibactericidal (killing bacteria), selfcleaning, and durability properties. The lab is determining how various mechanisms such as surface energy, topography, surface chemistry may contribute to these antibacterial properties.