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Tian Zhang is a PHD student in the School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering at the UNSW. She graduated from the Department of Light Source and Illumination Engineering of the Fudan University as a postgraduate student in 2015, after which she worked as failure analysis engineer for a year at Texas Instruments Inc.

Her current interest lies in making high-efficiency silicon solar cells using atomic layer deposited (ALD) metal oxides as hole-selective contacts.  ALD has an outstanding advantage of making thin films with high uniformity and conformity, and transition metal oxides (TMOs) like MoOx, WOx, NiOx and VOx have proper optical and electrical properties which enable them to be potential hole-selective contacts candidates. Tian is now working on optimising the ALD process to improve the performance of the passivation effect and contact resistivity of WOx, MoOx and NiOx with/without the PECVD intrinsic a-Si:H. Besides, she has been working on the material level analysis using techniques like XPS/UPS, Tof-SIMS, FTIR together with TEM/EDS. Her investigation of the thermal stability of WOx and MoOx has revealed that the hydrogen in a-Si:H could exert a significant impact on the stoichiometry and work function of the metal oxide films which leads to performance changes.