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Program

Materials

Solid state lighting is transforming general illumination with the promise of dramatic energy savings through widespread adoption. In order to maximally realize such benefits, lighting technologies must address human centric aspects such as light quality and color rendering, as well as the environmental impacts of the chosen solutions. Our Materials Team aims to address these critical aspects by developing new color-converting materials for the solid-state lighting market.

About our Materials Team

Our team consists of technicians, physicists, and chemists with a strong background in research and development. The main expertise of the Materials Team is in the field of rare-earth doped nanomaterials (“nano-phosphors”), but we also have experience with alternative materials like Quantum Dots and Perovskites. Due to the fundamental nature of the projects we often team up with world-leading university groups, and also have strong connections and collaborations with industrial partners to advance our projects towards scale-up and commercialization.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Sir Arthur Charles Clarke - English writer, inventor and futurologist

Our Main Technology

Our main technology delivers new narrow-band red emitters, which have the promise to deliver significantly increased light output for warm white LEDs, while ensuring high color quality light. Currently, we are focusing our work around blue-excitable Eu3+ as line-emitter for warm white LEDs. Eu3+ is known for its excellent emission properties for white light, but its weak absorption in the blue prevents these ions to be used for LEDs. Our fundamentally new concept of inter-particle energy transfer at the nanoscale solves this, by using separate (nano)materials for absorption and emission events. Seaborough has demonstrated the feasibility of this technology with various different materials and is currently working on delivering warm white LED demonstration devices.

Facilities

Our labs are situated in one of the “Matrix Innovation Buildings” at the Science Park in Amsterdam, which is a great environment for young technical companies. The campus offers many advanced shared research facilities such as an electron microscopy center, as well as the possibility to have our own lab space. In these, we are fully equipped to perform materials synthesis and optical characterization of luminescent (nano)materials.

Public Funding

Our “EuroLED” program has been granted a Horizon 2020 Eurostars subsidy under the grant number EUROSTAR.2018.34. We have also several projects running in collaboration with the group of Prof. Andries Meijerink from Utrecht University which are supported by the Dutch Research Organisation NWO.

Optical Characterization Service

Do you need reliable optical measurements of luminescent materials? Do you have (nano)phosphor materials, quantum dots, perovskites, or other luminescent samples which need to be optically characterized? Then Seaborough has the solution with a measurement setup that is validated according to industrial values.

What are we working on

2020 - Demo
Showcase
2020 - Demonstration
Demo

Our Materials Team

Atul Sontakke

Materials Scientist

Atul is a materials scientist with expertise on optical and luminescent materials. He did master’s in physics and holds PhD (Science) from CSIR-CGCRI in collaboration with Jadavpur University, India. Before joining Seaborough, Atul did post-doctoral research at Kyoto University (Japan), Chimie-ParisTech (France), Ghent University (Belgium) and Utrecht University (Netherlands). Atul has extensive experience on synthesis, spectroscopy, and quantitative analysis of functional luminescent materials. At Seaborough, Atul is working on development of phosphor materials for solid state lighting.

Vasilii Khanin

Materials Scientist

Vasilii is a Master in experimental nuclear physics with a focus on scintillation and engineering of nuclear spectrometers. He obtained his PhD in solid-state physics while working at Philips Research Eindhoven on development of scintillators for medical tomography. Afterwards he held Post-Doc positions in Utrecht University and TU Delft researching luminescence (solar) concentrators. Areas of expertise include luminescence spectroscopy, and energy and charge transfer in solids. He joined Seaborough in 2021 and works on optical equipment development and optimization of novel phosphors.

Fernando Nodal

Intern Materials

Fernando completed his bachelor’s in chemistry at the University of Warwick, UK. His research portfolio includes projects undertaken at the University of Vienna, Austria and the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory, Portugal. During his time at Seaborough, he hopes to bring his experience to the Materials Team and their work on the synthesis and stabilisation of Eu3+ nanoparticles.

 

Federico Montanarella

Materials Scientist

Federico is an expert in the synthesis and optical characterization of luminescent (nano)materials. He obtained a Master cum laude in Materials Science and Engineering from the Universita’ degli studi di Genova (Italy) in 2015. He also holds a PhD, obtained in 2019, from the University of Utrecht (the Netherlands), researching quantum dots and their luminescent assemblies. After obtaining the prestigious ETH Postdoctoral Fellowship, he spent two years at ETH Zürich (Switzerland), studying the formation and functionalization of perovskite nanocrystals. In 2021 Federico joined Seaborough as a Materials Scientist, where he works on the development of novel phosphors for solid state lighting.

Sandra Galván

Intern Materials

Sandra started her internship at Seaborough in September 2022. She is currently pursuing a master’s in molecular sciences at University of Amsterdam. With her specialization in organic and inorganic chemistry, she would like to apply all the knowledge she gained during her chemistry degree to her newfound interest in nanomaterials. Sandra is very excited to be involved in Seaborough’s innovative projects, she will be working on the development of nano-YAG phosphors.

Mike Krames

Senior Advisor

Mike is a recognized world authority on visible-spectrum LEDs and their applications for lighting and displays, with more than 20 years of experience in both startups and large companies in the LED industry. He is currently President and Founder of Arkesso, LLC, based in Silicon Valley, California.  Previously, he was Chief Technology Officer at Soraa, Inc., an LED product company founded by Nobel Prize winner Shuji Nakamura.  Prior to that, he was Executive Vice President at Philips Lumileds, where he ran the Advanced Laboratories and pioneered programs in LEDs and luminescence, focusing on materials, devices, and systems for applications to lighting and displays. He has served on numerous roundtables and panels for the U.S. Department of Energy and Basic Energy Sciences. He is an IEEE Fellow, IES Fellow and Chair of the SPIE Photonics West Conference on Light-Emitting Diodes.

He has been an advisor to Seaborough since 2015, where he is supporting technical and intellectual property development, project management, business development and the establishment of new partnerships.

Mohamed Tachikirt

Research Assistant

Mohamed holds a Bachelor’s degree in physics from the Haagse Hogeschool (university of applied sciences). He has worked at the physics research institute AMOLF as lab technician, before moving to Seaborough in 2015. At Seaborough he is responsible for the optical characterization and prototyping of both LEDs and materials.

Marie Anne van de Haar

Program Director Materials

Marie Anne obtained her Masters in nanomaterials sciences cum-laude from Utrecht University and holds a PhD in Nanophotonics from the physics research institute AMOLF. She joined Seaborough as Materials Scientist and Project Manager in 2015. Currently she is the Program Director Materials, where she is the technical program lead and responsible for running the current EuroLED program, including external partnerships and internal R&D Materials Team. She has been selected as ‘Technical Talent 2020’ by the Dutch engineering journal De Ingenieur, and is member of the program committee for the SPIE Photonics West Conference on Light-Emitting Diodes.

Valerio Favale

Research Assistant

Valerio obtained his master from Sapienza Università di Roma. He joined Seaborough in 2019 as chemical research assistant and is responsible for nano-phosphor synthesis, integration, and further optimizing the chemical synthesis procedures. In addition, he is responsible for the health and safety at Seaborough.

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    Science Park 106

    1098 XG Amsterdam
    The Netherlands

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