Professor Timothy Bender receives Connaught Innovation Award
Published: March 10, 2020
Professor Timothy Bender of the department of chemical engineering in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering has received a Conaught Innovation Award to support his work on next-generation materials for brighter, more flexible displays.
Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) are a group of chemicals that emit light upon stimulation with electricity. They lie at the heart of next-generation visual displays, and can be found in everything from smartphones to flat-screen TVs.
Bender and his team have partnered with U of T Engineering spinoff company Amber Molecular to commercialize a new and unique set of OLED materials.
The unusual chemical structure of the new compounds grants them a rare combination of electro-optical properties. They are valuable for their high-colour purity, highly efficient energy transfer and high chemical stability.
Bender and his team have also demonstrated that the compounds' electrical properties can be carefully controlled through the addition of substituent chemical groups.
鈥淭hese materials could be used as a drop-in solution in combination with existing OLEDs to enable richer colours in screens of all kinds,鈥 says Bender.
