Ashley Gaulding is a researcher within the Materials Science Center. Her work focuses on tuning nanomaterial heterostructures for both thermoelectric and solar devices. Before NREL, she spent one year as a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, working within the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) on inverse opal photonic crystals for CO2 reduction. Her Ph.D. work at the University of Pennsylvania (under Prof. Chris Murray) focused on the investigation of how ligand chemistry affects the electronic properties of semiconductor quantum dots using techniques such as Hall, temperature-dependent Seebeck, and field-effect transistor (FET) measurements. Additionally, she developed a dip-coating method by which to assemble binary nanocrystal superlattices over wafer-scale areas. At NREL, she studies the thermoelectric and opto-electronic properties of low-bandgap quantum dot/perovskite heterostructures as she tunes the separate components to target use in thermoelectric and/or solar devices.

Research Interests

Quantum dot and low-bandgap perovskite heterostructures

Thermoelectric characterization (Seebeck coefficient, electrical and thermal conductivity)

Opto-electronic characterization (absorption, emission, photocurrent)

Education

Ph.D. Materials Science & Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

B.Ch.E. Chemical Engineering, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Featured Work

Gaulding, E.A.; Liu, G.; Chen, C.T.; Löbbert, L.; Li, A.; Segev, G.; Eichhorn, J.; Aloni, S.; Schwartzberg, A.M.; Sharp, I.D.; et al., “Fabrication and optical characterization of polystyrene opal templates for the synthesis of scalable, nanoporous (photo)electrocatalytic materials by electrodeposition,” J. Mater. Chem. A (2017).

Gaulding, E.A.; Diroll, B.T.; Goodwin, E.D.; Vrtis, Z.J.; Kagan, C.R.; Murray, C.B., “Deposition of wafer-scale single-component and binary nanocrystal superlattice thin films via dip-coating,” Adv. Mater. (2015).

Guglietta, G.W.; Diroll, B.T.; Gaulding, E.A.; Fordham, J.L.; Li, S.; Murray, C.B.; Baxter, J.B., “Lifetime, mobility, and diffusion of photoexcited carriers in ligand-exchanged lead selenide nanocrystal films measured by time-resolved terahertz spectroscopy,” ACS Nano 9(2), 1820–1828 (2015).