René van Swaaij is associate professor in the Photovoltaics Material and Devices group at the TU Delft faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science. He is the programme director of the master programme Sustainable Energy Technology. His research interests lie mainly with the processing of silicon based solar cells and the physics underlying the operation of these cells. He is in charge of several projects in the field of thin-film silicon solar cells and lectures on semiconductor device physics in BSc and MSc courses.

René has authored and co-authored more than 100 journal and conference papers is and is co-author of the book "Solar Energy. The physics and engineering of photovoltaic conversion technologies and systems."