Solar breakthrough began with a “botched” microscope

perovskite films – In graduate school, electrical engineer Dane deQuilettes chased what he thought was a calibration error under his microscope—only to realize the culprit was the perovskite solar material itself. His accidental discovery overturned an assumption that perovskite

The first clue arrived as a blur he couldn’t trust.

In his second year of graduate school. Dane deQuilettes had just come back to the University of Washington from the University of Oxford. In Oxford, he had learned how to make perovskites—polycrystalline solar materials that can be printed like ink. He was eager to see what his film would reveal under the microscope.

But the image looked wrong. In his mind, the error wasn’t in the science. It was in him. He was convinced he had botched the calibration, and for days he spent time troubleshooting in secret.

What he found was the opposite of what he feared: the microscope was fine. The problem was the material.

Perovskites. by 2015. were drawing enormous attention because they were starting to become more efficient than other solar materials people were researching. The promise was simple and seductive—cheap, high-performance solar cells made from something that could be printed. But deQuilettes uncovered a detail that early work had treated as background noise.

Researchers had thought perovskite films were uniform. His work showed they were not. Instead, the films were a patchwork of crystals: some performed beautifully, while others leaked energy through defects. That discovery didn’t just correct a misconception. It redirected solar research toward neutralizing defects—turning a once-hyped material into something more demanding, and more precise.

For deQuilettes, the episode also helped set his course. The accidental result established him as one of the scientists pushing the field toward a harder, clearer understanding of what perovskites actually do.

He didn’t come to science through a straight line. Growing up in central Washington State, he was known as an athlete. Still. he kept slipping away to compete in Science Olympiad. uneasy about being labeled the “nerdy kid.” When he told his mother he wanted to study chemistry. she worried it wouldn’t pay enough to build a life. He responded with a salary survey.

That mix of curiosity and practical thinking seems to run through the work he’s doing now.

DeQuilettes joined Princeton University earlier this year, and he’s building the Quantum and Emerging Semiconductor Technologies Lab. He’s still working on solar materials, but he has widened his scope into quantum sensing. His focus there uses diamond crystals with tiny, engineered defects—features that act as exquisitely sensitive probes of their surroundings.

“It’s a mystery, and you get to learn really fast. That’s what excites me,” he says, describing the constant pull of unanswered questions.

The through-line from his “wrong” microscope image to his current lab is the same: the willingness to trust the data. even when it feels like it must be an error—especially when it isn’t. The sequence of his early troubleshooting and his later shift in the field matches the moment that changed everything: once the film’s patchwork reality came into focus. the path forward stopped being about repeating assumptions and started being about fixing the defects that were always there.

Dane deQuilettes perovskite solar electrical engineering Princeton University microscope calibration quantum sensing diamond crystals defects Science Olympiad solar energy