Williane Freitas

Tenure Track Researcher (RTT)

Profile

Williane Freitas has been a Tenure-Track Researcher (RTT) at the Department of Chemical Science and Technologies, University of Rome Tor Vergata (UNITOV), since April 2026, where she also held a Postdoctoral Fellowship from 2024 to 2026. She earned her Ph.D. in Chemical Sciences at UNITOV in 2022, with a thesis titled: “Platinum Group Metal-free Electrocatalysts for Oxygen Reduction Reaction in Electrochemical Devices”, which was awarded by the Executive Board of the Division of Electrochemistry of the Italian Chemical Society (SCI) with the 2022 “Fondazione Oronzio and Niccolò De Nora” Doctoral Prize.

Williane Freitas’s research interests include the electrochemistry of energy conversion and storage devices, including materials for oxygen electrocatalysis, the structure and transport properties of polymer electrolytes, bioelectrochemistry, and the electrochemical behavior of redox couples for redox flow batteries (RFBs). Her work is particularly focused on the synthesis of noble-metal-free electrocatalysts, such as hierarchical porous carbon structures, functional spinel oxides, and alloys; the characterization of their bulk and surface properties; and their application to key electrochemical reactions. These include the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) in polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs), microbial fuel cells (MFCs), and zinc–air batteries (ZABs), as well as the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) in low-temperature polymer electrolyte membrane water electrolyzers (PEMWEs).

She is the author and co-author of >15 research papers and scientific publications in Web-of-Science-indexed peer-reviewed journals, and 1 book chapter. Dr. Freitas’s research received multiple recognitions including the Best Oral Presentation award at the Italian Virtual Workshop on Fuel Cells (2021), and Best Poster awards from “ACS Energy & Fuels” at the 29th Topical Meeting – Energy & Water: Electrochemistry in Securing Sustainable Society Development of the International Society of Electrochemistry (ISE), Mikulov, Czech Republic (2021), and at the 2nd Congress of the Interdivisional Group on Chemistry for Renewable Energy (ENERCHEM2) of the Italian Chemical Society in 2020. In 2024, she was also honored with the Best Oral Presentation award at the X National Workshop of the Italian Association of Chemistry for Engineering (AICIng) in Perugia, Italy. She has worked as a guest editor and participated in several national and international conferences, delivering two invited oral presentations.

Dr. Freitas has been involved in several research projects including: the PNRR initiative, MOST Cascade Call – ELECTRIC, the PRIN2022 – ALEF, issued by the Italian Ministry of University (MUR), and the Executive Program of Science and Technological Cooperation between Italy (Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the International Cooperation, MAECI) and the People’s Republic of China (National Natural Sciences Foundation, NSFC) – HAMLET. Her work has been carried out in collaboration with national and international groups led by Prof. Vito Di Noto (University of Padova, Italy), Dr. Vincenzo Baglio and Dr. Irene Gatto (CNR ITAE in Messina, Italy), Prof. Carlo Santoro (University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy), Prof. Ernesto Placidi (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy), Prof. Plamen Atanassov (University of California Irvine, USA), Dr. Cinthia Alegre (Institute of Carboquímica in Zaragoza, Spain), and Prof. Jun Li (Chongqing University, Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi’an, China). Her teaching activity concerns General Chemistry for the degree courses in Medical, Energy, and Environmental Engineering, and Electrochemistry for the degree courses in Applied Chemistry at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. She also holds a course on “Materials for energy conversion and storage devices: electrochemical characterization techniques” within the PhD course in Materials for Sustainable Development (MaS).

Publications

ORCID

Scopus