Hi, I’m Lidija Sekaric and I’m the Acting Director for Solar Energy Technologies Office.  I manage a portfolio of about one billion in projects to advance both technology and the business space and lower market barriers for deploying Solar.  All with the goal of lowering the cost of solar generated electricity.

This is known as the intimidation wall...

To date, I have been issued thirty patents and they range in topics anywhere from nanoscale mechanical structures, which in the common parlance one can think as invisible musical instruments, all the way to structurs that we built to probe the limits of Moore's Law.

As we make the device smaller, it is a faster device and it is cheaper to make. At some point we are going to run out of that small space. We are going to run into a few atoms that we will be able to build or not build and at some point it might get to be too difficult to do that or too expensive. And so those are the limits of what is known as Moore's Law.

I am ultimately fascinated by understanding how things work.  And the beautiful thing about any kind of problem, or at least from a physicist's perspective, is that it can be broken down. And if it can be broken down into simpler components there is a way of attacking that problem.  Understanding what is it about market mechanisms; about lowering the cost to finance; about integrating solar in the grid or simply making it better, cheaper, more efficient cell is just another problem to tackle.  And it seems like a really, really big challenge and I like challenging problem.