Rate My Professor Lethy Krishnan

Dr. Lethy Krishnan Jagadamma is a Reader in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of St Andrews, where she leads the Energy Harvesting Research Group, established in 2020 as part of her UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship. Her research specializes in ambient energy harvesters for self-powering Internet of Things sensors and wearables, encompassing indoor photovoltaics using halide perovskites, mechanical energy harvesting via piezoelectric and triboelectric effects, ferroelectric materials, space photovoltaics, and thin-film energy storage devices. This work advances scalable fabrication techniques like blade coating, interface engineering to minimize recombination losses, and monolithic photovoltaic-supercapacitor systems, contributing to UN Sustainable Development Goals 7, 9, 11, and 12 on clean energy, innovation, sustainable cities, and responsible consumption. She is affiliated with the Institute of Engineering, Centre for Clean Energy Research, Centre for Energy Ethics, and Organic Semiconductor Centre.

Jagadamma's career includes a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship at St Andrews (2017-2020) focused on time-resolved photovoltaic properties of hybrid perovskites, a Research Fellowship at the Organic Semiconductor Centre, University of St Andrews (2015), and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the KAUST Solar Center (2012-2015), where she contributed to record-efficient organic and quantum dot solar cells. She has secured funding as Principal Investigator for projects such as smart battery-free indoor air quality monitors using printable perovskite solar cells (Medical Research Council, 2023-2024), self-repairing energy harvesters for IoT sensors (British Council, 2022-2024), and printable photovoltaic-supercapacitor units (EPSRC, 2021-2022). Key publications include "Self-poled halide perovskite Ruddlesden-Popper ferroelectric-photovoltaic semiconductor thin films and their energy harvesting properties" (Advanced Functional Materials, 2025), "Ferroelectric polarization in 2D halide hybrid perovskites: influence on bulk crystals, thin films, and applications" (Journal of Materials Chemistry C, 2025), "Advancing intercalation strategies in layered hybrid perovskites by bringing together synthesis and simulations" (Nature Communications, 2025), "Effect of preheating on phase distribution and orientation of 2D halide perovskite for indoor photovoltaics" (Energy Technology, 2026), and "Chlorine retention enables the indoor light harvesting of triple halide wide bandgap perovskites" (Journal of Materials Chemistry A, 2023). She serves on the Editorial Board of Scientific Reports since 2021 and supervises PhD students in indoor energy harvesting.