Electric Ingenuity

Minh Tran ’18 has a plan to harness significantly more of the sun’s power.

By Melissa Babcock Johnson

inh Tran ’18 has a sunny outlook on life, which makes sense when you consider that her life’s work is in the solar industry. But those rays of sunshine are laser-focused: Less than 4% of the electricity supply in the United States in 2024 came from solar energy, and Tran wants to increase that number with a technology she is developing that has the potential to significantly enhance solar panel performance.

Building upon the Ph.D. research she conducted at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering, Tran and NYU classmate Conrad Caviezel cofounded the solar manufacturing startup Heliotrope Photonics in the summer of 2023, 140 years after the first solar panel was invented and installed on a rooftop right there in New York City.

Today, photovoltaic cells are mostly made from silicon, which absorbs light and converts it directly into electricity. The process is a dance of sorts—the sunlight’s photons excite (that’s a scientific term) the silicon’s electrons, which then flow into an electric current. Panels of these cells can process some ultraviolet light along with the visible light, but most of the UV rays bounce off. Tran has discovered a way to scale up and reproduce a coating for these solar panels that converts wasted UV light into usable near-infrared light.

“When I started my Ph.D. in 2018, the infrared coating had been around for a couple of years, but at that time people were focusing more on liquid solution synthesis, and that can be challenging to scale up,” Tran says. “We use a method called vapor deposition, which stays much more stable as it is scaled up.” The proprietary technology Heliotrope is developing would add just one extra step to the current silicon solar manufacturing process.

Silicon solar cell technology has been in development since 1954 and has matured about as far as it possibly can, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Any upgrade to a standard solar panel these days boosts its power by maybe 1%. But, apply Heliotrope’s coating, and that same solar panel’s performance jumps by 8% to 15%—equivalent to an entire decade of progress, Tran says. More efficiency decreases costs, which increases accessibility and could lead to a rapid increase in the adoption of solar energy.

While the 28-year-old native of Hanoi, Vietnam, considers it “a bit early” to say she’s a success, Tran was named to the 2025 Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the Manufacturing & Industry category. And last year, Activate Global awarded her one of the country’s most prestigious and competitive fellowships in green technology. Her recognition as an Activate Fellow earned Heliotrope Photonics more than $300,000 in grants.

Now, the sky is literally the limit. While Heliotrope’s technology is still in the research and development phase, Tran is on track to blow a scientific theory proposed in 1961 out of the water. Most commercial solar panels are made up of single-junction silicon solar cells. Her goal is to increase the efficiency of these solar cells beyond the Shockley-Queisser limit of 33.7%.

Minh Tran ’18 displays a few of the single-junction silicon solar cells that make up most modern commercial solar panels, and the glass pieces that top them. The glass will feature Heliotrope’s proprietary perovskite coating that converts wasted UV light into usable near-infrared light, increasing the solar cells’ efficiency by 8% to 15%.

‘Anything Can Happen’

The sunny scientist and fledgling entrepreneur has long enjoyed exploring and challenging theoretical concepts. Tran arrived in the U.S. in 2014 to study chemistry at Connecticut College. Over the following four years, Professors Stanton Ching, Timo Ovaska and Jacob Stewart would help her refine her interests and determine her career path. For Tran, one class emerged as the clear winner: “Out of all the courses I’ve taken, including in grad school, quantum mechanics is still my favorite.”

In Conn’s chem labs and classrooms in Olin and Hale, students of quantum mechanics explore topics that include wave functions and operators, the Schrödinger equation, solutions of the wave equation in various potentials, angular momentum and spin, perturbation theory and the matrix formulation.

“At first, the material is kind of abstract and difficult to grasp,” Tran says. “But then the moment you get it, it’s very fun to play around with theory and application. The whole point of the class is that anything can happen, there are just different probabilities. That’s the philosophy I live by, too.”

Another course, organic chemistry, wasn’t a match. While Tran loved gaining lab experience and conducting different types of research, she also discovered she—quite literally—couldn’t stand the heat. “There was too much synthesis for me,” she admits. “But there’s really no bad experience, there’s just learning experience.”

She found that she liked chemical engineering and laser photonics, especially measuring light direction and absorption. “You synthesize a chemical, and then you characterize it, and then you analyze the data,” she says.

While studying inorganic chemistry, Tran learned minerals called perovskites can be used to harness solar energy. These crystalline materials are cheaper than silicon to obtain and process, require a much thinner active layer and are better at absorbing light. And now, she is using them as the basis for Heliotrope’s proprietary coating.

I like the solar industry—it’s green energy, it has a good mission and the research will have a meaningful impact on society.

— Minh Tran ’18

Perovskites to Ph.D.

That Tran’s undergrad inorganic chemistry lessons turned out to inform her Ph.D. research surprised her. She had learned about inorganic materials and their various characterization methods, but figured she’d never use them extensively.

But once at NYU, she shifted her focus from chemistry to chemical engineering. “I was interested in something more applicable,” she explains. “My background in chemistry made me very, very good with materials science.”

She found she had a lot in common with her Ph.D. adviser, Eray Aydil, the Alstadt Lord Mark Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and senior vice dean of New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering. With expertise in photovoltaic cells and coating techniques, Aydil has been contributing to the advancement of solar technology for more than two decades.

“When I first met with him, I said, ‘I like the solar industry—it’s green energy, it has a good mission and the research will have a meaningful impact on society. So, let’s do solar.’”

Her research at NYU centered on down-conversion perovskite thin films to improve silicon solar panels. She synthesized and optimized the materials’ properties using physical vapor deposition and characterized the materials with scanning electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction, absorption, photoluminescence and Raman spectroscopy—which is a fancy way of saying she figured out how to use perovskites to shift part of the sun’s light spectrum from light solar panels can’t use to light they can. Tran earned a Ph.D. in chemical and biomolecular engineering in 2023, and Aydil now serves as Heliotrope’s science adviser.

Tran was named to the 2025 Forbes 30 Under 30 list in Manufacturing & Industry. And last year, Activate Global awarded her one of the country’s most prestigious and competitive fellowships in green technology.

Turning Crystals into Gold

It’s one thing to develop a way to make solar panels more efficient and cost-effective. It’s entirely another to turn your research into a product and a business. Tran spent most of her Ph.D. program’s final year exploring marketing opportunities, she says. Classmates and professors affirmed that her research had potential and pointed out that NYU offered a great program for would-be entrepreneurs. To someone who likes to try everything, it sounded like a lot of fun.

“I wanted to learn more about the business side,” Tran said. “I was in the lab for five years, and I wanted to grow other skill sets like business strategy and negotiation.” She entered NYU’s Entrepreneurs Challenge in 2023, and Heliotrope Photonics was born. Caviezel, her business partner and Heliotrope’s CEO, earned an Executive MBA from NYU Stern School of Business in 2024.

Initially, it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. “The first year was really rough. I had no clue what I was talking about most of the time. I had no idea what I was doing. I had no funding at all the first few months,” Tran recalls. “The learning curve was very high in the beginning, and then I met Conrad. I learned how to speak like him—like an MBA, like an engineer. I learned to talk business.”

Still not ready to leave NYU after earning her Ph.D. in 2023, she started a postdoc with Aydil to continue her research and built her startup on the side with Caviezel. They began applying for grants and funding. “We had a rough year, but the year after that was sweet because all the money started coming in. Now we can have fun with the technology.”

Tran expects the research and development phase to last another three to five years, at which point she hopes to have a fully developed coating that could be sold or licensed to solar manufacturers.

“I’ve kept the perspective that the startup is a fun learning experience, and our technology is meaningful. Maybe it results in a successful product or maybe it doesn’t, but either way, we are contributing a lot of new scientific knowledge to the world.”