Karolis Leitonas outside Cynora
Karolis Leitonas is a young researcher from Kaunas University of Technology who began his six-month secondment at Cynora - in Bruchsal, Germany – in February 2020. However, due to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic crisis, he was forced suddenly to cut short his stay in mid-March and to return home to Lithuania in the middle of the night by car just prior to the German and Poland borders being closed.
Fast forward four months and the pandemic is sadly still raging. However, fortunately, the borders between Lithuania, Poland and German have been reopened and Karolis was able to resume his secondment in mid-July with Cynora.
Cynora is a company focused on developing OLED materials to enable a new generation of foldable, flexible and transparent displays. In particular, the company is a leading global pioneer of novel TADF-based blue and green emitter systems that will improve the power efficiency and colour purity of OLED displays, which makes it an ideal industrial partner for the MEGA project. Despite the company’s modest size, it is very international and employs scientists and technologists from Italy, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine, Ghana, Bangladesh, India, as well as Germany.
Fast forward four months and the pandemic is sadly still raging. However, fortunately, the borders between Lithuania, Poland and German have been reopened and Karolis was able to resume his secondment in mid-July with Cynora.
Cynora is a company focused on developing OLED materials to enable a new generation of foldable, flexible and transparent displays. In particular, the company is a leading global pioneer of novel TADF-based blue and green emitter systems that will improve the power efficiency and colour purity of OLED displays, which makes it an ideal industrial partner for the MEGA project. Despite the company’s modest size, it is very international and employs scientists and technologists from Italy, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine, Ghana, Bangladesh, India, as well as Germany.
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Operating the vacuum deposition equipment in the ISO 7 cleanroom
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Having recently completed his Masters in Materials Science - and with plans to start a PhD in the winter -the secondment at Cynora provides Karolis with the opportunity to learn about state-of-the art production of OLEDs. Thus, he has been learning to operate vacuum deposition equipment - in ISO 5 and ISO 7 cleanrooms – to produce substrates and a set of organic semiconductors for a basic OLED stack. Ultimately, he will use these OLED stacks to test the newly synthesized organic emitters developed in the MEGA project.
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Hiking around the Palatinate Forest
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Outside of work, Karolis is also an active person. Early morning, he can be seen running along the Rhine river and through the Karlsruhe palace gardens while enjoying the sunrise. On a recent weekend, he managed to hike 40 km in 8 hours around the national park of the Palatinate forest while taking in the sights of several medieval castles.
