Northwestern awards EPFL's Michael Grätzel honorary doctorate
Michael Grätzel © 2026 EPFL
EPFL professor Michael Grätzel will receive an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Northwestern University in recognition of his pioneering work in solar energy conversion.
Michael Grätzel, professor at EPFL’s School of Basic Sciences, will receive an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Northwestern University. The distinction will be conferred during Northwestern’s 168th Commencement ceremony on 14 June 2026 at the United Center in Chicago.
Northwestern will award four honorary degrees at the ceremony. The other recipients are actor and singer Heather Headley, actor and producer Sarah Jessica Parker, who will also deliver the Commencement address, and physician and academic David Skorton.
The announcement from Northwestern University highlights Grätzel as having “pioneered research on colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals and their use for solar energy conversion and storage, which has led to several groundbreaking discoveries in photovoltaics, electrochemistry and photo-electrochemistry, addressing the urgent need to develop low-cost and efficient systems for the conversion of sunlight to electricity and chemical fuels.”
About Professor Michael Grätzel
Professor Grätzel is world-renowned for inventing the first dye-sensitive solar cell in 1991 with chemist Brian O’Reagan. Just as plants use chlorophyll to turn sunlight into energy, the “Grätzel cells” use industrial dyes, pigments or quantum dots stimulated by sunlight to transmit an electrical charge. Within fifteen years of the original invention, Grätzel evolved the cells into an applied technology that is now being developed in universities and companies worldwide.
Having discovered molecular photovoltaics, Grätzel’s research has focused on designing mesoscopic photosystems based on molecular light harvesters that convert light very efficiently to electricity. He is credited with moving the photovoltaic field beyond the principle of light absorption via diodes to the molecular level. Recently his research engendered a second revolution in photovoltaics prompting the advent of perovskite solar cells. In just a single decade, their power-conversion efficiency increased from 3% to over 26%, rivaling and even exceeding the performance of conventional photovoltaics.
Grätzel also applied his innovative mesoscopic design concept to enhance the power of lithium-ion batteries and to create photoelectrochemical cells that efficiently generate chemical fuels from sunlight, opening a new path to provide future sources of renewable energy that can be stored.
Grätzel currently directs EPFL’s Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces within the Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering (ISIC). His more than 1,800 publications have received over 500,000 citations, and have an h-index of 313. In 2019, Stanford University ranked Grätzel first of 100,000 top scientists across all fields. According to the Web of Science, he is currently the most highly cited chemist in the world.