Susanna M. Thon is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Johns Hopkins University. She also serves as the Director of Undergraduate studies for her department, is on the leadership council for the Ralph O’Connor Sustainability Institute (https://energyinstitute.jhu.edu/), and is a Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute (https://hemi.jhu.edu/) fellow. She studies nanomaterials engineering for optoelectronic devices, with a focus on solar energy conversion and sensing.

Her work applies techniques from nanophotonics and scalable fabrication to produce devices and materials with novel optical and electrical functionality. Thon’s team is currently working on a number of projects, including ways to use nanostructured materials, such as colloidal quantum dots, two dimensional metal dichalcogenides, and plasmonic metal nanoparticles, to build multicolored, transparent, and next-generation devices. Insights from Thon’s research on photovoltaics and photosensing are helping to push the boundaries of efficiency and cost-effectiveness through the use of flexible platforms and new materials.

Thon’s work has received funding from the American Chemical Society, National Science Foundation, Maryland Energy Innovation Institute, TEDCO Maryland Innovation Initiative, and the U.S. Army. She is the recipient of Johns Hopkins’ Catalyst and Discovery awards. More than 50 of her research papers have been published in peer-reviewed journals.

She received her bachelor’s degree from MIT in 2005 and her master’s and Ph.D. (all in Physics) from the University of California Santa Barbara in 2008 and 2010, respectively. Prior to joining Johns Hopkins in 2013, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto.