Loredana Protesescu (F) (Ph.D. obtained in 2016) has been an assistant professor since 2019 at  Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials, University of Groningen. She is an inorganic chemist with solid expertise in the chemistry of (novel) nanomaterials, their structural particularities, and their surface chemistry in relationship to self-assembly, and their properties. She uses chemical design to achieve functional materials at the nanoscale with applications in energy, extreme environment, and bio-applications. She has vast experience in the development of tailored semiconductor nanocrystals with applications in opto-electronic devices. Her contribution to the perovskite semiconductors nanocrystals is reflected by her extensive work with lead and tin halide perovskites with 2D and 3D structures and morphologies. She has published about 55 papers. She contributed to the development of two patents, and she is the scientific advisor of Peafowl Plasmonics, a Sweden start-up company. She has recently won the Nanomaterials 2020 Young Investigator Award and a Veni NWO grant (2019). She was selected as an Early Career Board member for Nano Letters starting 2022.

Top three publications:

[1] Kushagra Gahlot, Sytze de Graaf, Herman Duim, Georgian Nedelcu, Razieh M Koushki, Majid Ahmadi, Dnyaneshwar Gavhane, Alessia Lasorsa, Oreste De Luca, Petra Rudolf, Patrick CA van der Wel, Maria A Loi, Bart J Kooi, Giuseppe Portale, Joaquín Calbo, Loredana Protesescu Structural Dynamics and Tunability for Colloidal Tin Halide Perovskite Nanostructures Advanced Materials, 2022, 2201353

 [2] Loredana Protesescu, Joaquin Calbo, Kristopher Williams, William Tisdale, Aron Walsh, Mircea Dincă Colloidal Nano-MOFs Nucleate and Stabilize Ultra-Small Quantum Dots of Lead Bromide Perovskites Chemical science, 2021, 12 (17), 6129-6135

[3] M.V. Kovalenko, L. Protesescu, M.I. Bodnarchuk Properties and potential optoelectronic applications of lead halide perovskite nanocrystals Science, 2017, 358, 745-750

In publication (1) Protesescu and colleagues discuss the recent advances in the field of semiconducting lead-based perovskite nanocrystals. The essential feature of these nanomaterials - defect-tolerance - is explored to develop low cost and effective active materials for light emitting devices, displays, or sensors. The ongoing research direction is highlighted and it focuses on the intrinsic disadvantages of halide perovskites: i) their ionic nature, which determines the instability in operating conditions of devices, and ii) the content of lead, which is known to accumulate in the human body and therefore has strict restrictions on the EU market. Those limiting factors stimulated the work described in the other selected publications.

In publication (2) Protesescu designed a host-guest strategy to prepare ultra-small lead halide perovskites (blue emitters), which are stabilized and studied for the first time. The use of metal-organic frameworks in the form of colloidal nanocrystals to ensure solution processability of the final heterocomposites proved to be very efficient in stabilizing the perovskite nanomaterials.

In the most recent publication (3), Protesescu found a way around lead content's pressing and ethical issues for these exceptional classes of nanomaterials. She reports tin-based halide perovskites with excellent long-term stability in a controlled atmosphere and significant opto-electronics properties, an important step towards the technical application of the materials.