Professor Pere Roca i Cabarrocas is an electrical engineer from the Universitat Politécnica de Barcelona. In 1984, he moved to Paris, where he received his PhD from University Paris VII in 1988. After a post-doc position at Princeton University, he joined the Laboratory of Physics of Interfaces and Thin Films at École Polytechnique, where he holds the positions of Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) Director of Research and Professor. From 2012 to 2020, he was the Director of the Laboratoire de Physique des Interfaces et des Couches Minces (LPICM) and the French PV Federation. Since 2019, he is the Scientific Director of the Institut Photovoltaïque d'Île-de-France (IPVF).

Pere has thirty years of experience in the field of plasma deposition of silicon-based thin films for large-area electronic applications. His work covers the study of RF discharges for the deposition of amorphous, polymorphous, and microcrystalline silicon thin films. He has used in-situ diagnostic techniques such as UV-visible ellipsometry, Kelvin probe, and time-resolved microwave conductivity to understand the growth of these materials and apply them to the production of devices such as solar cells, thin-film transistors, particle detectors, and sensors (etc.). More recently, Pere has been applying silicon nanocrystals synthesized in plasma as building blocks for the epitaxial growth of silicon and germanium thin films as well as nanostructured nanocrystalline silicon-oxide-doped layers. On the other hand, he has extended the plasma processes to the growth of vertical silicon nanowires for third generation solar cells and of horizontal ones for planar electronic applications. He was the recipient of the Médaille Blondel in 2004, the Innovation Award at École Polytechnique in 2009, and the Silver Medal from CNRS in 2011. He has been an Invited Professor at Nara Institute of Technology since 2016 and a member of EURASC since 2022.