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Roel van de Krol is head of the Insitute for Solar Fuels at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie GmbH (HZB) and full professor at the Chemistry Department of TU Berlin. After earning his PhD from TU Delft in 2000 and a postdoctoral stay at MIT (USA), he returned to TU Delft where he was an assistant professor until 2012. At HZB, his group focuses on the development of materials and devices for the photoelectrochemical conversion of sunlight into chemical fuels. One of the main areas of interest is the work on multinary metal oxides as novel light absorbers. Understanding how surface and bulk defects affect light absorption, charge transport, recombination, and catalytic activity in these materials is at the heart of these efforts.