Materium Technologies, a startup company with deep NJIT roots, is bringing data science innovations into the slowly evolving field of solar energy panels. Startups are always a gamble, but the Materium team has a good hand, with two pair of Highlanders — recent alumni Sheldon Fereira (M.S. ‘23) and Scott Daniel (M.S. ‘24), advised by Professor Nuggehalli Ravindra and Adjunct Instructor Michael Jaffe. Their collective scientific expertise spans the worlds of artificial intelligence, applied physics, biomedical engineering, and semiconductors.
Their idea evolved throughout 2023 and the company was incorporated in January 2024. Fereira had been studying applied physics and data science, while researching how the latter could help engineers choose optimal ingredients for new materials that have unique requirements. He then met Ravindra, known as “Dr. Ravi” to his students, and learned that solar panels lose efficiency over time.
Today’s best solar panels are 24% efficient at turning light into energy, but most products are only 21%, Ravindra said. Their efficiency erodes over years or decades, due to the effects of infrared light frequencies. (This also means that solar panels lose less power in colder environments, not where it’s hottest, which is the opposite of what a non-physicist might expect.) To read the full story.