Jao van de Lagemaat is the center director of the Chemistry and Nanoscience Center at NREL. He received his doctorate in 1998 from the University of Utrecht. He worked on the exciton dynamics, charge transport properties, and the physical and chemical properties of interfaces of large-band-gap semiconductors such as SiC, GaP, GaN, and diamond. From 1998 to 2001, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at NREL. His studies focused on charge transport and recombination in dye-sensitized solar cells. His papers in this field have proven seminal to the understanding of this unique system.

From 2001 to the present, he has worked as a scientist at NREL on the energetics and transport properties of single semiconductor nanoparticles (quantum dots) and arrays of nanoparticles using tunneling spectroscopy and microscopy, transient photocurrent, transistor measurements, and computer modeling. He is researching tunneling-induced luminescence and plasmon-resonance imaging of individual quantum dots, the interaction between carbon nanotubes and organic semiconductors, and the use of plasmonic-enhancement effects in solar energy conversion systems.

In addition to his position at NREL, van de Lagemaat is also a fellow of the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute as well as a fellow of the Materials Science and Engineering Program, both at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Lastly, he is a lecturer in the Department of Physics at the same university.