Dr. Iwan Hächler

Iwan received his Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering at ETH Zurich with stops in Sweden, Singapore and the US . His focus was on Energy Technologies and Product Development. After his Master’s, Iwan worked on solar desalination and optical metamaterials for sunlight applications at the Lawrence National Laboratory in Berkeley (LBNL). He then completed his PhD under the supervision of Dimos Poulikakos at the Laboratory of Thermodynamics in Emerging Technologies (LTNT) at ETH. His research focused on nanoengineering the interaction of light with matter, and how this can be beneficially employed for interfacial phase-change phenomena related to water.

Iwan’s research interests lie in the area of light-matter interaction, radiative energy transfer, surface thermodynamics and interfacial phase change phenomena, all in the context of the water-energy nexus.

Iwan joined CAPS in January 2023 as a Pioneer Fellow and is investigating a transparent, near-infrared absorbing metamaterial and how this can be commercialized.