Ron Sinton

Ron Sinton is President and Senior Scientist of Sinton Instruments, in Boulder, CO USA. 

He graduated with a BS in Engineering Physics from CU Boulder in 1981 followed by an MS and PhD in Applied Physics from Stanford University. His PhD was on the design, fabrication, and measurement of high-efficiency silicon solar cells based on silicon integrated-circuit technology to test the upper bounds of what could be achieved. After the demonstration of 28% efficient solar cells, Ron was a founding member of SunPower, a silicon-valley startup working to commercialize this technology. 

In 1992, he founded Sinton Instruments. This company developed measurement and analysis methods for solar-cell research and manufacturing with over 2000 instruments in use worldwide. Despite taking the for-profit rather than academic route, Ron has over 10,000 citations for publications on silicon-solar-cell device physics. He was honored with the Cherry Award for technical contributions in photovoltaics in 2014. 

More recently, Ron has also become involved as a pro-bono expert witness in utility regulatory hearings on integrating high levels of renewable energy onto the electricity grid. He has 7 patents, about 200 publications, and has been involved in the annual conference organization for 4 of the major international PV conferences. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Photovoltaics and has served on advisory boards for an NSF/DOE center and a California Energy Commission research program on long-duration energy storage.