Dr. Tom Aernouts, R&D Manager Thin-Film PV at imec, initiated the research on thin film solar cells at imec in 1999. Till 2006 he was researcher working on fundamental understanding of organic solar cells and developing bulk heterojunction solar cells and fully flexible modules. Since 2006, Dr. Aernouts is group leader of IMEC's Thin Film PV group, steering IMEC's thin film PV research activities, with a first infrastructure upgrade in 2009 enabling processing devices up to 15x15cm², and a next upgrade just completed in 2018 to extend the device size to 35x35cm². The group has extended its activity in 2014 with the work on hybrid, perovskite-based thin-film solar cells. In a short period of time this group has attracted a lot of attention with its fast progress in this field with world-record certified module efficiency of 12.5%, as well as a recently reported world's first 4cm² module-on-cell perovskite/silicon stack with a power conversion efficiency of 25.3 percent, outperforming the standalone silicon solar cell. Also, first modules on 30x30cm² have recently been successfully processed.

Dr. Aernouts received his M.Sc. in semiconductor physics from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, in 1998, and a Ph.D. in Science in 2006 from the same university.