Hemamala Karunadasa

Karunadasa grew up in Colombo.[3] She attended high school in Sri Lanka and was a student at Ladies' College, Colombo.[4] She thought that she would become a doctor, and eventually decided to apply to university in America.[3] She was an undergraduate student at Princeton University, where she majored in chemistry and materials science.[5] She was awarded a Certificate in Materials Science for her undergraduate project in 2003.[5] During her undergraduate degree, Karunadasa worked with Robert Cava on the geometric magnetic frustration of metal oxides.[5] His excitement about research inspired her to continue her own academic career.[3] Karunadasa joined the University of California, Berkeley for her doctoral studies, working in inorganic chemistry with Jeffrey R. Long. During her PhD research Karunadasa developed catalysts for water splitting as well as exploring heavy atom building blocks for magnetic molecules.[6] The molybdenum-oxo metal complex created by Karunadasa is around seventy times cheaper than platinum, the most commonly used metal catalyst in water splitting.[4][6][7]

Karunadasa worked on electrocatalysts with Christopher Chang at the University of California, Berkeley.[5] She was a postdoctoral fellow with Harry B. Gray at the California Institute of Technology, where she worked on catalysts for hydrocarbon oxidation.[5]

She was appointed to the faculty at Stanford University in 2012.[8] Her group creates hybrid perovskite materials that combine small organic molecules with inorganic solids. Three-dimensional lead iodide perovskites are being investigated for solar cells, but they can be both unstable and toxic. For example, their sensitivity to water makes them difficult materials to use in the fabrication of large-scale devices.[9] Karunadasa is interested in ways to mitigate for these shortcomings, and any transient changes that may occur when these materials absorb light.[9] In particular, Karunadasa has created two-dimensional perovskites, with thin inorganic sheets, that can be tuned to emit every colour of visible light.[10][11] In these systems the organic small molecules are sandwiched between the sheets.[10][12] In the case of thick inorganic sheets, the inorganic materials act as absorbers, and enhance the stability of the perovskite materials. The organo-metal-halide perovskites created by Karunadasa and her collaborator Michael McGehee can be processed in solution.[13] She believes that through careful chemical design it is possible to determine the fate of photogenerated charge carriers. Karunadasa has investigated the lifetimes of acoustic phonons in lead iodide perovskites with Michael Toney and Aron Walsh.[14]