Roger Welser has joined Magnolia Solar as its chief technology officer. He will be responsible for leading the development of next-generation high-performance solar cells using advanced nanostructured materials at the Woburn, MA-based company.
Before joining Magnolia, Welser served as director of technology and new product development in III-V materials at Kopin, an innovator in the area of nanosemiconductor materials and devices. His R&D group at Kopin has led the industry in bandgap engineering the material structure to continuously improve the performance and cost of GaAs-based transistor devices.
Welser has also been actively involved in photovoltaics. His graduate studies were supported by the NASA Graduate Student Researcher’s Program, with a focus on materials for high-efficiency, multijunction III-V solar cells. More recently, he has won funding from NASA, DARPA, and the NSF to pioneer the development of quantum solar-cell structures.
Welser holds a PhD in applied physics from Yale University and an undergraduate degree in physics with honors from Swarthmore College. He has authored more than 70 publications, patents, and presentations.
