Dr. Lawrence Kazmerski, a leading research director at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), received the World PV Award at the Fourth World Conference on Photovoltaic Energy Conversion on May 9.

Dr. Lawrence Kazmerski, a leading research director at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), received the World PV Award at the Fourth World Conference on Photovoltaic Energy Conversion on May 9 for his outstanding contributions to the worldwide advancements of photovoltaic (PV) science and technology.

The award, sponsored by professional organizations from the European, Asian-Pacific Rim and American photovoltaic communities, recognizes superior and sustained leadership in solar photovoltaics.

Kazmerski is director of NREL's National Center for Photovoltaics and was the first staff member hired to do photovoltaics research for NREL's predecessor, the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI). He has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Notre Dame and was on the faculty of the University of Maine before joining SERI in 1977. He has been an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado, Colorado School of Mines and the University of Denver.

In his 30-year career in solar photovoltaics, Kazmerski has published more than 290 journal papers on solar cells, thin films, semiconductor materials and devices, surface and interface analysis, scanning probe microscopy, nanoscale technology, high-temperature superconductivity and semiconductor defects. An author and editor of four books, he is editor-in-chief of the Elsevier journal, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews.

Kazmerski is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineer, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a Fellow of the American Vacuum Society. He has won three R&D 100 Awards for the development of three separate devices that provide 3-D information about the composition of electronic materials, characterizes electro-optical materials down to the atomic scale and produces maps of crystal defects in semiconductor materials using a scanning laser.

NREL is the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) primary national laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development. NREL is operated for DOE by Midwest Research Institute and Battelle.