Professor Anita Ho-Baillie still remembers the moment solar energy captured her imagination.
She was a second-year student when one of her lecturers took the class onto a rooftop and showed them a solar panel connected to a water pump. When the panel was covered, nothing happened. When it was uncovered, the water began to move.
“I was fascinated,” she says. “There’s electricity, and it’s free from the sun.”
That simple demonstration helped set the course for a career dedicated to improving how the world captures and uses solar energy. Today, as the University of Sydney’s John Hooke Chair of Nanoscience, Professor Ho-Baillie is working at the forefront of next-generation solar cell technology, helping to unlock more efficient and flexible ways to generate clean energy.
Her research focuses on perovskite solar cells, an emerging technology that could dramatically improve how much energy can be captured from sunlight. While silicon solar panels already power rooftops and large-scale solar farms around the world, Professor Ho-Baillie explains that silicon has a natural efficiency limit. Some of the sun’s energy is converted into electricity. The rest is lost, often as heat.
Her team is working on materials that can be layered on top of silicon to convert the higher-energy light such as ultraviolet and blue light more efficiently to electricity. These layers are extraordinarily thin, ranging from micro-scale to nanoscale, about 100 to 100,000 times thinner than silicon.
The work is highly technical, but its purpose is to “convert all that free sunlight to electricity”, she says, and reduce reliance on fossil fuels.
A gift with a future in mind
Professor Ho-Baillie joined the University of Sydney as the inaugural John Hooke Chair of Nanoscience, a role established through a philanthropic gift from John Hooke CBE. A University of Sydney science and engineering alum (BSc ’55 and BE ’58) and passionate believer in the potential of science, Hooke wanted to support a field he saw as full of possibility.
The Chair was created to establish a world-leading research program in nanoscience, deeply connected to the Australian Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology and the Sydney Nanoscience Hub.
In Professor Ho-Baillie’s hands, that vision has become a program of research with direct relevance to one of the defining challenges of our time: how to generate clean energy more efficiently and affordably.
For Maria Teresa Hooke, wife of the late John Hooke, watching Professor Ho-Baillie’s work grow has been an honour.
“It has been a genuine privilege to know Anita Ho-Baillie during her time at the University,” she says. “Holding the John Hooke Chair of Nanoscience, she has made remarkable advances in solar cell perovskite technology, with her work attracting widespread recognition. What stands out just as much as her scientific achievements, however, is her down-to-earth nature and her ability to communicate highly complex ideas with clarity and directness.”
“It’s fantastic to have the chair professorship at the right school, at the right faculty, at the right university. But it’s not just about me, it’s the students.”
Professor Anita Ho-Baillie
John Hooke Chair of Nanoscience
From promise to progress
Since arriving at the University of Sydney, Professor Ho-Baillie’s work has expanded in both scale and ambition.
“We extended the application of our new types of solar cells,” she says, from land to space, and to design-integrated applications where solar technology could be placed on surfaces beyond traditional panels. Her team has also partnered with Australian industry, contributing to a growing renewable energy ecosystem.
Her work was recognised in 2025 with the Australian Museum Eureka Prize for Sustainability, awarded for her leadership in developing next-generation solar cells.
Professor Ho-Baillie is proud of the recognition, but she sees it as something shared.
“I feel the award is not just for me, but for the team,” she says.
Students at the centre
For Professor Ho-Baillie, one of the unexpected joys of coming to the University of Sydney has been the calibre of the students.
Since December 2019, she says she has supervised 63 undergraduate students through special studies and scholarship-supported projects. Eleven have contributed to publications in high-impact journals.
One of those student-led moments opened a new research direction.
In her first weeks at the University, while she was still unpacking boxes, a student knocked on her door with an unusual question: could they fly her solar cells to space?
Professor Ho-Baillie’s answer was simple: “Why not?”
That question led to a new project exploring whether the materials could withstand radiation in space. The results showed strong potential and helped Professor Ho-Baillie secure further grant funding.
For her, this is part of the deeper impact of the Chair. It is not only about scientific outputs, but about creating the conditions for students to ask bold questions and help shape new fields of discovery.
“It’s fantastic to have the chair professorship at the right school, at the right faculty, at the right university,” she says. “But it’s not just about me, it’s the students.”
What philanthropy makes possible
The John Hooke Chair has given Professor Ho-Baillie the ability to build a research group, work at scale and pursue ambitious ideas across disciplines.
“I wouldn’t have been able to establish a group to do really challenging stuff, to do research at scale, to have a very ambitious program, without the philanthropic funding,” she says.
That matters because important scientific questions do not always fit neatly into traditional funding structures. Professor Ho-Baillie says multidisciplinary research can be difficult to fund through conventional schemes, which are often organised around established disciplines.
By contrast, philanthropy can provide continuity and confidence. Asked what philanthropic support enables, Professor Ho-Baillie answers simply: “Scale, ambition.”
It also provides the stability to pursue research that is more uncertain, but potentially transformative. Without that support, she says, researchers may be pushed towards easier projects with a shorter-term vision.
Looking ahead, Professor Ho-Baillie is focused on making next-generation solar technologies more reliable and more widely usable, from buildings and vehicles to satellites and devices. The goal is clean energy generated closer to where it is needed.
The science is complex and progress takes patience. But Professor Ho-Baillie’s motivation remains grounded in people.
“It’s the students,” she says. “And the enthusiasm of the people around me.”
Her work still carries the wonder of that first rooftop demonstration, of sunlight, motion, possibility. Free energy from the sun, and the nanoscale science helping the world make more of it.
Hero image: John and Maria Teresa Hooke, with their sons John Maximilian and Paolo. Photo provided by Maria Teresa Hooke.
Professor Anita Ho-Baillie with solar cells in 2022. Credit: University of Sydney/Stefanie Zingsheim
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