Prof. Dr. Maksym Kovalenko

Since August 2020, Maksym Kovalenko has been a full professor of Functional Inorganic Materials at the Laboratory of Inorganic Chemistry.
He jointed ETH Zurich in summer 2011 as a tenure-track assistant professor and was promoted to an associate professor in January 2017. The research activities of Maksym Kovalenko and his group focus on chemistry, physics and applications of inorganic solid-state materials and nanostructures. In particular, present research efforts concern: (i) the precision synthesis of highly luminescent semiconductor nanocrystals; (ii) nanocrystal surface chemistry; (iii) exploration of novel semiconductor materials by solution- and solid-state synthesis; (iv) novel semiconductors for hard radiation detection; (iv) novel materials and concepts for Li-ion and post-Li-ion rechargeable batteries. Many of these activities are strongly linked to industrial partners. Academic collaborations involve various groups ranging from first-principles theory of materials to applications in photovoltaics and thermoelectrics.

M. V. Kovalenko serves as an Associate Editor of Chemistry of Materials and as the Chair of the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry (2018-2019).

Prof. Kovalenko, born in 1982, grew up in Ukraine (Bukovina region). He studied chemistry at the Chernivtsi National University, and then continued at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria (PhD in 2007 with professor Dr. Wolfgang Heiss; thesis topic: novel infrared-active colloidal nanocrystals). Subsequently, he joined the University of Chicago for postdoctoral training with professor Dmitri Talapin (research topic: inorganic ligand capping of colloidal nanocrystals), where he stayed until joining ETH Zurich. Some activities of the KovalenkoLab, related to batteries and light-emitting devices, are conducted at a sister ETH institution – Empa (Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology).

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