Dr. Steven Hegedus has been involved in solar cell research for 30 years. He received a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University in 1977 and went to IBM Corp to design and test integrated circuits. During this time he went to Cornell for a Masters in Electrical Engineering, analyzing GaAs solar cells for his thesis. In 1982, he joined the research staff of the Institute of Energy Conversion (IEC) at the University of Delaware (UD), the world's oldest photovoltaic research laboratory.  While at the IEC, he got a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from UD in 1990.

At IEC, he has worked on all of the commercially active solar cell technologies – a-Si, CdTe, Cu(InGa)Se2, organic, and c-Si - but his special focus are those made from a-Si and related materials.

Areas of active research over 3 decades have included optical enhancement, a-SiGe alloys, textured TCOs, thin film device analysis and characterization, a-Si/c-Si heterojunctions, and stability under accelerated degradation conditions. He has contracts with the US Dept of Energy and is actively collaborating with many US PV and supply chain companies, large and small Dr. Hegedus has been an author of over 100 papers in the field of solar cell device analysis, processing, reliability and measurements.  He has consulted for several companies in the PV supply chain.

He co-edited the 1st and 2nd editions of the "Handbook of Photovoltaic Science and Engineering" (Wiley 2003, 2011) and he is a co-editor of the journal "Progress in Photovoltaics". He teaches a graduate class at UD in Solar Energy Technology and Applications and has advised over ten graduate students. He has a secondary appointment in the Electrical Engineering Department.

Dr. Hegedus is keenly aware of the impact of policy on solar energy commercialization and is a Policy Fellow at UD's Center for Energy and Environmental Policy since 2006. He was the first resident of his town to install a rooftop PV system.