Keeping up the passion
Tabitha Amollo (in red top) with her research group of students and technical staff. © private
Dr. Tabitha A. Amollo is a researcher and lecturer at Egerton University in Njoro in Kenya. She holds a Ph.D. in physics from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Her research interests focus on developing cutting-edge nanomaterials for energy conversion devices including graphene nanomaterials. She published a number of articles in reputable journals. At Egerton University, she is the head of a young team to explore dye-sensitive solar cells, she is a chairperson of the Physics Department, and she coordinates the undergraduate program and gives lectures to undergraduates and postgraduate physics students.
Here in Germany, there are not many women in physics. How is it in Kenya?
That’s similar, only few girls choose physics. In my case, in high school, I had a good physics teacher. I was the best student and he gave me a science book as an award. And this really encouraged me to take physics in the following grade.
What are you working on in your lab?
I am totally fascinated by new organic materials, such as dye sensitive materials for solar cells of the next generations. We are developing such new materials, combining them with graphene and nanostructures, and examining their photovoltaic performance.
What is your connection to BESSY II?
Last November, Dr. Antje Vollmer gave a great talk at my university, Egerton, and we all got really excited about the options at BESSY II. We are really looking forward to start experiments. I will come for the user meeting and beamtime in June 2023 and I will bring some of my students along. It will be a very busy week, we plan to measure our samples to inquire their quantum efficiencies, but also to examine them under the Transmission Electron Microscope, Scanning Electron Microscope and with Atomic Force Microscopy. And I hope to get into contact with the PV-experts at HZB, they have great expertise in perovskite materials, another very fascinating class of materials.
Do you have a vision for the future?
I want to contribute to society with my research in solar energy. We just had a black out here in the lab, we often do, it is a problem. So I am really working to improve the energy system. Solar energy has great potential to provide cheap electricity, and it is fossil free, so it will not contribute to global heating.
How did you start your own lab? What were the first steps?
Well, a research lab requires equipment, and for phyisics experiments, these are expensive. I won two research grants, in 2020 and 2022, which financed the equipment acquisition. The focus of my research lab is the development of innovative solar energy conversion materials and technologies.
What is your advice to young students?
I would advise them to keep up their passion, their curiosity. There always are obstacles, and passion gives you the energy to surmount them.
This blogpost is part of a series on our cooperation with scientists from Kenya.
- Marcel Risch has been appointed Professor at the Freie Universität BerlinMarcel Risch was appointed to a W2-S professorship in the Department of Physics at Freie Universität Berlin in August 2026. His research group has been transformed into the department 'Mechanisms of Sustainable Electrocatalysis'. Risch investigates the fundamental mechanisms of electrocatalytic reactions and, on this basis, develops knowledge- and data-driven strategies to improve electrocatalysts for the sustainable production of hydrogen, fuels and chemicals.
- New technique could make MRI more preciseA team of researchers at the University of Stuttgart and HZB has developed a new method that could make MRI even more precise by eliminating “dead time,” a key limiting factor in the measurement process, thereby enabling the detection of signals that are lost using conventional methods. This method opens up new possibilities for medical diagnostics and non-destructive materials testing. The research team presents the new approach in Science Advances.
- New method shows how molecular switches are influenced by their neighborsResearchers at Friedrich Schiller University Jena and the Helmholtz Centre Berlin (HZB) have, for the first time, been able to directly observe how the environment surrounding a molecular switch influences its electronic structure. Molecular switches are molecules that can be switched between two states by external influences such as changes in temperature—similar to a switch with the positions »On« and »Off«. Such molecules are being investigated as potential building blocks for future data storage devices or sensor materials. Using magnetic-field-dependent terahertz spectroscopy, the researchers have now, for the first time, been able to distinguish whether neighbouring molecules in a material are in the same or different states. The results have been published in the journal »Angewandte Chemie International Edition«.