Dr. Beck is an innovator and strategist with over 3 decades of senior and executive RD&D, project & operations management expertise in the photovoltaic industry. He served as Chief Technologist at First Solar in the United States and Vice President of the PV Development Team at Samsung in Korea, as well as in other leadership positions at 3 PV startups and has advised several global companies in the renewable energy sector on technology and business-related aspects. In his role as the Program Manger for the Manufacturing and Competitiveness sub-program at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Energy Technologies Office Dr. Beck focused on private-public partnerships through strategy and program development supporting industry-lead innovation and new product development and demonstration across the full PV value chain. He recently joined RCT Solutions, a global owner’s and lender’s engineering firm successfully executing over 100GW of projects to date. Dr. Beck will focus on supporting PV manufacturing activities in the North American market.
Dr. Beck holds a PhD in physical chemistry and has been awarded over a dozen scholarships and awards in the field of PV research and manufacturing. He is the primary inventor on 22 patents. As a subject-matter expert of ANSI US-TAG and IEC TC82 WG2, for two decades he has been actively engaged in global PV-standards activities. Dr. Beck has served on numerous DOE PV review boards and chaired the IEEE Santa Clara Valley PV Chapter from 2013–2015. He is a subject-matter expert for the peer-reviewed journals Thin Solid Films and Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells, and in 2012 was appointed to the editorial board of the latter.