Dr. Ludmilla Steier

Biography

Ludmilla Steier is a Professor of Inorganic Chemistry and a Goodenough Tutorial Fellow at St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford. She obtained her BSc and MSc degrees in Chemistry from the University of Siegen, Germany, where she developed a strong interest in electrochemistry and semiconductor physics. This interest led her to pursue her MSc final project on dye-sensitized solar cells under Professor Michael Grätzel at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. She subsequently worked on oxide thin film photoelectrodes for photoelectrochemical water splitting and perovskite solar cells, obtaining her Ph.D. in 2016. Afterwards, she joined Professor James Durrant’s group at Imperial College London to study photochemical and photophysical processes in semiconductors using time-resolved spectroscopy, shortly awarded the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship from 2017 to 2019. Ludmilla began her independent research career as an Imperial College Research Fellow from 2019 to 2021 and moved to Oxford in October 2021. In 2023, she was awarded the Materials Chemistry Early Career Prize by the Royal Society of Chemistry for her significant contributions to understanding defect chemistry in semiconducting materials and interfacial energetics in photocatalytic and photovoltaic devices. Her research group at Oxford focuses on designing atomically-defined photo-electrocatalysts to convert CO2 and water waste products into energy-rich fuels and chemicals with high conversion efficiency and stability.

Research Interests

Experience