Assistant Professor, KAUST
Nazek El-Atab is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Principal investigator of the Smart, Advanced Memory devices and Applications lab (SAMA) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia. Prof. El-Atab’s research interest focuses on the design and fabrication of smart multifunctional devices and their applications, including in-memory sensing and computing, 4D-printed actuators, among others.
Prof. El-Atab has received several awards for her research, including the 2015 For Women in Science Middle East Fellowship by L’Oreal-UNESCO, the 2016 IEEE Nanotechnology Student Travel Award, the 2017 International Rising Talents Award by L’Oreal-UNESCO, and was portrayed in the 2019 “Remarkable Women in Technology” by UNESCO. Prof. El-Atab was also selected to participate in the 70th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Germany, was selected among the 2020 UC Berkeley EECS Rising Stars, among the 10 Innovators under 35 by MIT Technology Review Arabia in 2020, and as a “NEOM Changemaker” in 2021. She is an IEEE Electron Devices Society Distinguished Lecturer.
The demand on flexible and stretchable energy harvesting devices is rapidly increasing, driven by the substantial market growth of a wide range of applications including wearables and humane robotics. In this talk, I will demonstrate a deep reactive ion etching based corrugation technique to transform large-scale commercial rigid solar cells with interdigitated back contacts into ultra-flexible and ultra-stretchable cells with negligible degradation in the initial efficiency. The design of the corrugated patterns to achieve the desired performance and characteristics of the solar cells in terms of flexibility, stretchability, specific weight, power output and heat dissipation will be discussed. Finally, the application of the corrugated cells in omni-directional light harvesting will be demonstrated.
Assistant Professor, KAUST