Dane W. deQuilettes

Dane grew up in a small town at the foothills of the Cascade Mountains in Washington State. During his childhood, he spent most of his time outside in nature and developed a fascination for science to explain the inner workings of the universe. This lifelong passion for chemistry and physics took him from the west coast to the east coast and eventually to the Garden State - beautiful Princeton, NJ.

Prior to Princeton, Dane spent 6 years at MIT where he served as a Research Scientist at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the Quantum Information and Integrated Nanosystems group as well as a postdoc in the group of Vladimir Bulovic. In 2017, he received his Ph.D in Chemistry and Nanotechnology from the University of Washington working in David Ginger’s group as a NSF Graduate Research Fellow. His research has led to several world records in semiconductor charge carrier lifetime, perovskite LED efficiency, as well as photovoltaic power conversion efficiency. He has been named 1 of the top 28 “Young American Scientists” by Scientific American, awarded the IUPAC-Solvay International Award for Young Chemists for best PhD thesis, and was listed to Forbes 30 under 30 in Energy for his work on emerging semiconductor technologies.

He is also a Cofounder and Chief Scientist at Optigon, an MIT spinout that builds multimodal metrology tools for automated materials and device characterization. He is generally excited about translating new scientific ideas to real world impact and works closely with industry partners as well as national labs.

Outside of lab, Dane enjoys playing sports, rock climbing, backpacking, playing guitar, and traveling to new places around the world.