Mr. Lai received the award for the paper entitled "Large Area 19.6% Efficient Rear Passivated Silicon Solar Cells with Local AL BSF and Screen-Printed Contacts" that he co-wrote with his Ph.D. advisor Ajeet Rohatgi, ECE Regents' Professor and director of the University Center for Excellence in Photovoltaics Research and Education (UCEP).  Additional coauthors were Ajay Upadhyaya, Rishi Ramanathan, Arnab Das, Keith Tate, Vijaykumar Upadhyaya, Aditya Kapoor, and Chai-Wei Chen, all also of UCEP.

Moving high-efficiency and low-cost solar cell technology from the lab to commercial application requires overcoming numerous challenges. The small area lab-scale experiments used in the initial research must be extended to large-area, commercial grade cells before they can be accepted in the real world. Research at UCEP shows how new silicon solar cell technology can make this transition from the lab by adding three key improvements to the manufacturing process. The resulting efficiency of 19.6% in the demonstration cell represents the highest efficiency in this class of fully screen-printed commercial grade solar cell to date.