Robert Hoye is an Associate Professor of Inorganic Chemistry, and Tutorial Fellow at St. John’s College.
He obtained his first degree from the University of Auckland (New Zealand), and was awarded a Cambridge-Rutherford Memorial scholarship to pursue a PhD at the University of Cambridge (2012-2014), working with Judith Driscoll.
He subsequently took up a postdoctoral position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working with Tonio Buonassisi on developing defect tolerant semiconductors, as well as perovskite-silicon tandem photovoltaics.
Afterwards, in 2016, Hoye returned to the University of Cambridge to become an independent Research Fellow, supported by Magdalene College and hosted by Prof. Sir Richard Friend. There, he worked on ultrafast spectroscopy and optoelectronic device development of novel metal-halide semiconductors, including halide elpasolites and perovskite nanoplatelets.
In 2018, Hoye became an independent Principal Investigator through the Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship, and in 2019 he became a Fellow of Downing College Cambridge, where he was the inaugural Silverman Research Fellow. Hoye explored the use of BiOI for applications beyond photovoltaics, including photoelectrochemical cells, which was recently published in Nature Materials.
Overall, in the 4 years Hoye was in Cambridge as a Research Fellow, he supervised 9 PhD students, 5 of whom have already graduated and are now working at Imperial College, ASML, McKinsey and a display startup.
In 2020, Hoye took up a permanent academic position (Lectureship) at Imperial College London. During this time, he pushed beyond the halide compounds in the exploration of perovskite-inspired materials, and focussed on understanding the effects of carrier-phonon coupling. His group also worked on indoor photovoltaics, luminescent nanosystems, radiation detectors and gas sensors. In mid-2022, Hoye was promoted to Senior Lecturer.
Hoye moved to his current positions in Oxford on October 2022. He has been awarded several prizes, including the Imperial President’s Award for Outstanding Early Career Researcher (2021) and the Rosenhain Medal and Prize (2021) by the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining. He was awarded an ERC Starting Grant in 2021 (now funded by UKRI).
