Dr. Sauvé was born in Montréal, Canada. She obtained her PhD at Caltech, working on inorganic solar cells with Prof. Nathan S. Lewis. She then spent some time at PPG Industries as a senior development chemist, working on smart windows. In 2002, she joined Prof. Richard D. McCullough‘s group at Carnegie Mellon University as a postdoctoral fellow. There, she synthesized conjugated polymers and diblock copolymers based on polythiophene. She also set-up instrumentation and developed procedures to make devices and to quickly test organic materials in field-effect transistors. Her work enabled significant contributions to fundamental research on structure-property relationships in conjugated polymers. She was also part of a multidiciplinary team to develop integrated sensors. After accepting a position as assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University, Dr. Sauvé deferred by a year and went to Berlin, Germany, where she collaborated with physicists studying organic solar cells (Dr. K. Fostiropoulos of the Helmholtz Centre Berlin for Materials and Energy, and Prof. Dieter Neher of Potsdam University). She was also fortunate to have funding from the Max Plank Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces and from DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service). In August of 2009, Dr. Sauvé joined the chemistry at Case Western Reserve University. She is a Mentor fellow, has received a Glennan Fellowship for developing hands-on experiements for her Solar Energy Conversion course, is an Active Learning Fellow and has received a prestigious NSF CARREER award. She was promoted to Associate Professor of Chemistry with Tenure July 1, 2015 and to Professor July 2021. 

Research: Google Scholar

Teaching

Spring 2012-2020:  CHEM 340/440 Solar Energy Conversion.
This is a multidisciplinary course from a chemist’s viewpoint. Topics included: Global energy perspective, Basics of Solar energy conversion, Principles of photovoltaics and intro to semiconductor physics, Crystalline solar cells, Thin films – a-Si, CdTe and CIGS, Plastic solar cells, Photoelectrochemical cells and fuel production, Dye-sensitized solar cell, Molecular photosynthesis and fuel production. The course also includes two laboratories during class time.

Fall 2009-2023: CHEM 335 Physical Chemistry I
Thermodynamics, Electrochemistry and intro to Kinetics.  In Fall of 2014, Dr. Sauve converted this course to a flipped classroom, where students learn the basics before class (read book and notes, watch videos) and work on exercises and problems in class. This allows for the students to ask more questions in class, as well as learn from peers and from me.

Spring 2019, 2022 and 2024: CHEM 336 Physical Chemistry II
Quantum, Spectroscopy and Statistical Thermodynamics.