Joel Jean

About Me

Present

I am a co-founder and CEO of Swift Solar, a U.S. startup developing high-efficiency, lightweight, and flexible solar photovoltaics to help make carbon-free energy the obvious choice. My work in and out of the lab is deeply motivated by the global impacts of climate change, and I get excited about renewable energy of all kinds, energy economics, and semiconductor device physics.

Past

Before joining Swift, I served as the founding executive director of GridEdge Solar, a research program at MIT developing new solar technologies for applications in India and other developing countries. My work in GridEdge focused on technoeconomic modeling and scale-up of lightweight, flexible, low-cost solar cells based on emerging quantum dot and perovskite materials. I am now an external advisor to GridEdge.

I grew up in Ohio and studied electrical engineering at Stanford, where I built computational models of electron transport in nanostructures toward a new photoemission-based approach to solar energy conversion. I completed a SM and PhD in electrical engineering at MIT as a NSF Graduate Research Fellow and MIT Energy Fellow advised by Vladimir Bulović. During grad school, I served as co-president of the MIT EECS Graduate Student Association (GSA), organized climate action with Fossil Free MIT, coached grad students and postdocs with the MIT Communication Lab, and co-authored the MIT Future of Solar Energy Study. I was named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 and Business Insider Rising Stars of Clean Energy lists.

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