Maria C. Folgueras is a 4th year Materials Science and Engineering Ph.D. student in the Peidong Yang group, where she is a member of the perovskite subgroup and where she serves as one of the lab safety managers. Before attending UC Berkeley, Maria received her B.S.E. and M.Eng. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Duke University. In her free time, she loves to exercise, hike, sing, and explore the Bay Area.

Maria C. Folgueras’ research is focused on understanding the influence of the individual octahedron units (IOUs) on the resulting material properties of perovskite crystal structures. In recent work, Folgueras et al. discovered zero-dimensional (0D) semiconductor perovskite inks of vacancy-ordered double halide perovskites Cs2TeX6, in which Cs+ cations and [TeX6]2– octahedral complex anions are successfully stabilized in polar aprotic solvents without the presence of ligands. Given that these fundamental octahedral building blocks (with maximum length of 5–6 Å) can be stabilized in solution without ligands (as opposed to colloids, whose stability requires the use of ligands), it is now possible to probe fundamental thermodynamic, kinetic, energy transfer, and electronic properties intrinsic to the perovskite IOU. Manipulation of these IOUs will more fully elucidate the role and dynamics of the IOU as the perovskite structural and functional unit at both the solid-state and solution levels.