Giuseppe Portale obtained his PhD in Chemical Science at the University of Rome "La Sapienza". In 2006, he moved to the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF, Grenoble, France) for a post-doc funded by the Dutch Polymer Institute (DPI) to develop new experiments to study polymer structure and dynamics with X-rays. In 2009 he became staff scientist at the ESRF, where he was the responsible for the SAXS/WAXS BM26B station. In 2015 he joined the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials as Assistant Professor. Since February 2021 he is employed as associate professor and chair of Polymer Physics research group. His research activity focuses on the synthesis and structure-property study of polymeric and soft materials for energy applications as well as the in-situ and operando study of dynamic structuring and phase transitions in nanostructured materials. He has been the recipient of three DPI grants (2017, 2018 and 2021) and the co-applicant of one NWO Materials-NL grant (2020). Giuseppe Portale serves as member of the editorial board of the journal Polymers and he is member of scientific review panels at the ALBA (Spain), DESY (Germany) and ALS (USA) synchrotrons and from 2017 to 2021 he acted as member of the scientific advisory committee of the ESRF.

3 top publications 2017-2022

1) Dong J, Shao S, Kahmann S, Rommens AJ, Hermida‐Merino D, ten Brink GH, Loi MA, Portale G "Mechanism of crystal formation in Ruddlesden–Popper Sn‐based perovskites." Advanced Functional Materials 30.24 (2020): 2001294.

Here we report the first real time crystallization study during fast drying of lead-free perovskite systems employing in-situ GIWAXS. The work shows a clear structure-solar cell performance correlation for such environmental-friendly systems.

2) Viviani M, Fluitman SP, Loos K, Portale G. "Highly stable membranes of poly (phenylene sulfide benzimidazole) cross-linked with polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxanes for high-temperature proton transport." ACS Applied Energy Materials 3.8 (2020): 7873-7884.

The cross-linked proton exchange membrane synthesized here combines mechanical robustness, chemical resistance and nanovoids that can be efficiently filled by phosphoric acid. It is the most stable system so far able to operate in harsh, phosphoric acid conditions.

3) Ma C, Dong J, Viviani M, Tulini I, Pontillo N, Maity S, Zhou Y, Roos WH, Liu K, Herrmann A, Portale G. "De novo rational design of a freestanding, supercharged polypeptide, proton-conducting membrane." Science Advances 6.29 (2020): eabc0810.

This manuscript shows the design from scratch of a novel bioinspired material able to conduct protons is a controlled manner. The proton transport is inspired by synthetic fuel cell polymeric materials while the mechanical robustness is inspired by spider silk structure.