After more than 30 years at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Dr. Kurtz is excited to have the opportunity to support the energy revolution in California through cutting-edge research and education. She moved to the University of California Merced in late 2017 and is very pleased to leverage her decades of experience with solar energy to now identify how to integrate that technology with long-duration storage to enable the electrical grid to operate reliably at low cost. 

She earned a PhD in Chemical Physics at Harvard University studying amorphous silicon solar cells, then spent about two decades studying multi-junction solar cells. These GaInP/GaAs cells have been very successful in space, but have not succeeded in terrestrial markets. Just before moving to the University of California she spent about a decade studying reliability of photovoltaic modules and systems.