Dr Hiroyuki Fujiwara is based at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Ibaraki, Japan. He received his PhD at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1996 and carried out post-doctoral research with Professor R.W. Collins at Penn State University. From 1998 to present he has been working as a senior research scientist at the Research Center for Photovoltaics at NIAIST. He received the 'Most Promising Young Scientist Award' from the Japan Society of Applied Physics and the 'Young Researcher Award' at the World Conference on Photovoltaic Energy Conversion in 2003.