Prof. Robert Hoye, CEng CSci FIMMM MRSC MInstP
Education and Training
After graduating from the University of Auckland (New Zealand) with a first-class degree, Hoye was awarded a Cambridge-Rutherford Memorial scholarship to pursue a PhD at the University of Cambridge, which was focussed on developing oxide charge transport layers for optoelectronic devices, working with Judith Driscoll, FRS FREng.
He subsequently took up a postdoctoral position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), working with Tonio Buonassisi, and collaborating with Moungi Bawendi (2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry) and Vladimir Bulović, as well as Mike McGehee (formerly Stanford, now U. Colorado) and Vladan Stevanović (NREL). There, he developed lead-free alternatives to halide perovskites, based off new concepts on defect tolerance. Materials investigated include BiI3, (CH3NH3)3Bi2I9 and others. He also developed perovskite-silicon tandem photovoltaics, and approaches to monolithically integrate the two sub-cells together. This work contributed to a multi-Institute publication in Nature Energy, and the first entry for perovskite-silicon tandems on the NREL efficiency chart. Hoye also led a multi-Institute effort to discuss the challenges of characterisation and computations on new classes of lead-free perovskite-inspired materials, which was published in Chemistry of Materials.
Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge (2016-2019)
In 2016, Hoye returned to the University of Cambridge to become an independent Research Fellow, supported by Magdalene College and hosted by Sir Richard Friend, FRS FREng. There, he worked on ultrafast spectroscopy and optoelectronic device development of novel metal-halide semiconductors, including halide elpasolites and perovskite nanoplatelets. He also collaborated with Judith Driscoll on a novel bismuth-based compound, bismuth oxyiodide (BiOI), which he showed to tolerate its most common vacancy and anti-site defects, and for which he devised a new photovoltaic structure that led to efficiencies double previous reports. This work was published in Advanced Materials and featured by Cambridge, the Royal Academy of Engineering, and others. Hoye also collaborated with Erwin Reisner, Sir Tony Cheetham FRS, Neil Greenham, Laura Torrente and Sam Stranks in Cambridge. Externally, he worked with Henry Snaith, FRS (Oxford), Jochen Feldmann (LMU-Munich), among others.
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 published in Nature Materials. He also worked with the Reisner Group to contribute to their efforts on perovskite photocathodes for floating self-driven syngas reactors, which was published in Nature.
Overall, in the 4 years Hoye was in Cambridge, he supervised 10 PhD students, all of whom have graduated and are now working at Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College, ASML, McKinsey, Helio Display Materials, and the civil service.
Lecturer and Senior Lecturer at Imperial College London (2020 - 2022)
In 2020, Hoye took up a permanent academic position (Lectureship) at Imperial College, where his labs were based in the new Imperial spoke of the Henry Royce Institute, located at Imperial’s White City Campus. During this time, Hoye supervised students and postdocs at Imperial, as well as students who stayed at Cambridge. It was during this time that he pushed beyond the halide compounds in the exploration of perovskite-inspired materials, and focussed on understanding the effects of carrier-phonon coupling (published in Nature Communications). His group also worked on indoor photovoltaics (published in Advanced Energy Materials and featured on the cover), light-emitting diodes based on perovskite nanosystems (e.g., see JACS paper), radiation detectors and gas sensors. In addition, he established a new collaboration with Peter Petrov, Jerry Heng and Rongjun Chen to develop nanopackaging to enable ambient-stable RNA-based vaccines, funded through a President’s Excellence Fund project (paper published on the cover of Nano Letters). He also secured an MIT-Imperial Seed Grant to establish a new collaboration with Raf Jaramillo (MIT). During his time at Imperial, Hoye also worked closely with Aron Walsh, Sandrine Heutz, Martyn McLachlan, Artem Bakulin, Nicola Gasparini, as well as Laura Herz, FRS (Oxford), Peter Müller-Buschbaum (TUM, Germany), David Scanlon (UCL), and others. He interacted strongly with the Henry Royce Institute, Centre for Processable Electronics and London Centre for Nanotechnology. He published invited articles on defect tolerance and novel metal-halide semiconductors in Nature Communications, Joule, Advanced Energy Materials, and others.
Associate Professor and Full Professor at the University of Oxford (2022 - present)
Hoye took up an Associate Professorship at Oxford in Oct. 2022, as well as a Fellowship at St. John’s College. He was also awarded a Senior Research Fellowship by the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2024, working together with the Science & Technology Facilities Council. His group and labs are based in the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory. So far at Oxford, Hoye's group has developed a BiOI X-ray detector capable of detecting very low dose rates of X-rays (see paper in Nature Communications), as well as self-assembled perovskite nanoplatelets for linearly polarised light emission (see paper in Nature Photonics). He led a roadmap involving >80 PIs from across the UK and beyond to discuss the current status and future directions for photovoltaics, and was invited to write his views on the use of supramolecular complexes for addressing the lead toxicity of halide perovskites (see piece in Nature Sustainability), as well as invited reviews for Nature Reviews Chemistry, Chemical Society Reviews, Advanced Materials and others. He is on the editorial advisory board for EES Solar, Advanced Optical Materials, APL Electronic Devices and Nanotechnology, and he is an Associate Editor for ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. In 2026, Hoye was promoted to full Professor of Materials Chemistry, and became a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair.
In addition to his academic role, Hoye is CTO of startup NanoPrint Innovations Ltd., which is commercialising equipment for renewable energy device manufacturing. Hoye was included in the MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 Europe in 2023 (follow this link for news release).
Hoye’s career path has been highly interdisciplinary, and his group has backgrounds in Chemistry, Physics, Materials Science and Engineering. Hoye has been awarded prizes from the Royal Academy of Engineering (2018 Young Engineer of the Year), Royal Society of Chemistry (2024 Beilby Medal and Prize), Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (2021 Rosenhain Medal) and Institution of Engineering and Technology (2019 Sir Henry Royce medal), as well as internationally (2020 WIN Rising Star award, 2023 MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 Europe, 2024 Rising Star of Light) and by Imperial (2021 Outstanding Early Career Researcher). He was also elected a Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining in 2020, and received the prestigious ERC Starting Grant in 2021 (now funded by UKRI).