“As a researcher at ETH, it is fantastic to have academic freedom and work on things that have never been done before.”
- Alumni Portraits
- Materials Alumni
Samuel Halim and Norman Lüchinger are co-founders of Avantama, which is a leader in high-tech materials for electronics. Both of them started off by studying Material Sciences and gained their PhDs in Chemical Engineering. In this interview, Samuel and Norman talk about their experiences of the PhD course at ETH and what their current business is about.
You are the founders of Avantama. What does your company do?
“Avantama” stands for “advanced materials”. With our materials, we want to help the world become brighter and more efficient. Our electronic materials, for example, ensure the efficiency of next-generation solar cells. Our optical materials are based on so-called Perovskite quantum dots. These tiny semiconducting nanoparticles are really fascinating. They can fully absorb specific wavelengths of light, and re-emit a different colour at an efficiency of about 100 percent. Also the colour purity is extremely high. These properties are key for display applications. Our materials enable traditional LCD displays to generate up to 40 percent more colours at maximum energy efficiency.
What motivates you (on a daily basis)?
It is fascinating to work on tiny particles with an impact on a global scale. On the one hand, we enable a much better end consumer product experience but at the same time, our work can also have a significant impact on the environment. Around 300 million square metres of display area are produced each year corresponding to an area of over 40 000 football pitches. If all new displays took advantage of our materials, we could save energy equivalent to several nuclear power plants. We achieve this with only one sixth of a gramme of nanoparticles per square metre.
"Communication is key, especially now, when we can’t visit our customers for face-to-face meetings."Samuel Halim & Norman Lüchinger
What challenges do you currently face?
The display industry consists of large enterprises only. Although they are used to working with smaller companies, we have to convince them that we are the right partners. Whilst the display industry is mainly based in Asia, every country has a different mentality. China is different to Japan, South Korea or Taiwan. Communication is key, especially now, when we can’t visit our customers for face-to-face meetings.
Both of you have a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH). How did you find the course?
In our view, your experience of a PhD course depends a lot on the PhD supervisor, the institute as well as you as an individual. As a researcher at ETH, it is fantastic to have academic freedom and work on things that have never been done before. This is something unique about each PhD course. Once a project gets into commercialisation, you quickly learn that what you did during your PhD is only the first kilometre of a marathon that you need to finish if you want to bring a technical innovation to the market. The rest is hard graft with a lot of repetitive work, often frustrating, but also very rewarding.
"If you want to bring a technical innovation to certain industries a PhD title helps in technical discussions."Samuel Halim & Norman Lüchinger
How did your degree from ETH help you get onto the career ladder?
Since we both are co-founders of external page Avantama, we basically created our own career ladder. But what we can say is that if you want to bring a technical innovation to certain industries, like the display industry, a PhD title helps in technical discussions. Your customer understands that he can discuss technical issues with you, at least in Asia. In Europe, especially in Switzerland the degree is not as important.
When you were kids, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Norman: I wanted to become an archaeologist because I am fascinated by ancient and antique things with history (of course my interest in dinosaurs also fuelled this when I was a kid). Digging for gold, crystals or treasures just fascinates me although I am not doing this literally. But working in science and research is actually very similar because you have to be patient, stay motivated and keep digging for the technical solution.
Samuel: I wanted to become a pilot or a medical doctor. My eyesight was far too bad to fly and medicine didn’t motivate me because there was too much to learn by heart. I still believe it would be good if there were more doctors with more of an ETH approach. What the ETH course really taught me is to think logically and never lose sight of the global picture.
What advice can you give today’s students?
Take maximum advantage of studying at one of the best technical universities in the world, with world-class equipment and excellent researchers. With any ETH degree, you can become anything you want. But think carefully if you want to do a PhD. Don’t just start a PhD course because it’s the easiest solution or just because of the title.