Robert Hoye

Robert Hoye is an Associate Professor at the University of Oxford, co-founder of a start-up, and leader of a team of 12 people developing a new generation of semiconductors that could revolutionize sustainable energy conversion. Robert completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge (2012-2014), followed by a postdoctoral position at MIT. He returned to the University of Cambridge as a Research Fellow in 2016 before founding his group at Cambridge through the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) Research Fellowship in 2018. He moved to Imperial College London in 2020 as Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer, before moving to Oxford in 2022. 

Robert has discovered and patented a new class of semiconductors that can tolerate imperfections, enabling efficient performance to be achieved when manufactured cost-effectively. These defect-tolerant semiconductors include compounds containing the nontoxic element bismuth, which he has developed into photovoltaics for clean electricity production with outstanding potential. A core application is to use these devices to harvest the energy widely available from indoor lighting to sustainably power Internet of Things (IoT) electronics. IoT are key to creating a smarter future, but heavily rely on batteries. Over 100 billion batteries will need to be replaced each year when there are a trillion IoT nodes. The bismuth-based semiconductors Robert discovered have the potential to achieve >50% efficiency, and using these to power IoT devices directly, or in synergy with an energy storage device, reduces the reliance on short-lived batteries, which could unleash the potential of the IoT.

For his visionary and pioneering work, Robert has been awarded 35+ international prizes, including 2018 Young Engineer of the Year by the RAEng, and 2019 Forbes 30 under 30 – Europe.