Charles J. Hages, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the University of Florida Department of Chemical Engineering, has received the Sony Faculty Innovation Award. With this award, Dr. Hages will use machine learning to enhance the development of semiconductor materials.

Characterizing material properties is a critical aspect of developing new semiconductors – whether for renewable photovoltaics or materials for advanced computing. Hages’ work will accelerate the ability to determine these material properties and expand the scope of information gained from typical measurements.

“Our goal is to eliminate the need for time-consuming (and often erroneous) manual analysis of data. Such measurement data can be very complex – and the time is ripe to leverage modern computational resources to solve this problem,” Dr. Hages said.

The Sony Faculty Innovation Award provides up to $100K in funds to conduct pioneering research. This is the first Sony award given to someone at UF.

The Hages Lab develops next-generation semiconductors for energy research.