Natalie Stingelin

Stingelin studied materials science at ETH Zurich, graduating in 1997.[4] She remained there for her graduate studies, earning a PhD[2] in 2001 which was awarded the ETH Zurich medal – the highest honour a PhD can receive at ETH Zurich.[4]

She joined the Philips Research Laboratories as a research associate in 2003.[5] She was a research associate at the University of Cambridge and Queen Mary University of London.[6] At Cambridge she worked with Henning Sirringhaus and Sir Richard Friend.[7]

Stingelin secured funding from the EPSRC to establish the Centre for Plastic Electronics at Imperial College London.[8] She studies organic electronic materials and how their microstructure impacts their electronic properties.[6] She is a member of the IUPAC committee on polymer terminology.[9] In 2011, Stingelin was awarded a European Research Council starting grant, and in 2015, she secured an ERC Proof-of-Concept grant.[4][10] Her research considers organic photovoltaics and organic thin film transistors.[11][12][13] Her main research areas are the microfabrication and selective patterning of organic electronic materials and inorganic-organic frameworks.[14] She developed a model that describes the relationship between charge transport, disorder and aggregation in conjugated molecular systems.[15] High molecular weight polymers demonstrate a charge transport that is limited by lattice disorder.[15] She also demonstrated that crystallisation of fullerene molecules in polymer/fullerene blends is the driver of charge separation.[16][17]

Stingelin has been the co-lead of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Large Area Electronics, and led the European Commission Marie Curie INFORM network.[4][18][19] In 2016, Stingelin joined Georgia Institute of Technology,[20] and since 2017, she has been active in Bordeaux as Chaire Internationale Associée, enabled by the Excellence Initiative of the Université de Bordeaux. She has spoken about organic electronic materials at the World Economic Forum.[21] She is on the editorial board of the Journal of Materials Chemistry C,[22] Advanced Functional Materials, ACS Macro Letters, ACS Materials Letters, Chemistry of Materials, Polymer Chemistry and Polymer Crystallization.