David Faiman

Background

Faiman attended the University of London and received his Ph.D from the University of Illinois in 1969. In September 1973 Faiman immigrated to Israel (made aliyah) from the U.K. two weeks before the start of the Yom Kippur War. He worked at the Weizmann Institute as a theoretical physicist until Amos Richmond recruited him to assist in the founding of the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Sde Boker. In 1976, Faiman joined Ben-Gurion University and helped establish the Blaustein Institutes; he then began to focus his research into the field of applied solar energy. He became a tenured professor at Ben-Gurion University in 1995. He is Professor of Physics and Chairman of the Department of Solar Energy & Environmental Physics at the Blaustein Institutes.

Faiman lives in Sde Boker, Israel, in a passive solar house where all heating and cooling needs are taken care of by the sun.

Career

Faiman's work attempts to use concentrated sunlight and a solar panel to produce more electricity than believed possible. He and his team designed a reflector that concentrates light so strongly that it can burn organic material, and then directs it at a solar panel that collects and converts it into electricity twice as efficiently as standard panels. Faiman's team feels this discovery is a way to mass-produce solar energy to be cost competitive with fossil fuels. On National Public Radio, Faiman claimed that his team was able to derive 1,500 watts of electric power from a four-by-four-inch (100 by 100 mm) module. They have reportedly teamed with Israeli start-up company Zenith Solar to build a prototype. Faiman is an adviser to the company.

He is Israel's representative to the Task 8 Photovoltaic Specialist Committee of the International Energy Agency and co-authored their book, Energy from the Desert: Practical Proposals for Very Large Scale Photovoltaic Systems (James & James, London, 2007).