Rate My Professor Marta Costa Figueiredo

Marta Costa Figueiredo serves as an Assistant Professor in electrochemistry within the Department of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry at Eindhoven University of Technology. She has been a member of the Inorganic Materials Chemistry research group since April 2019. Figueiredo obtained her MSc degree in Chemistry from the University of Porto in Portugal in 2008. She then pursued her PhD in electrocatalysis for the reduction of nitrogen-containing compounds at the University of Alicante in Spain from 2009 to 2012, earning the distinction of cum laude and the Best PhD Thesis in Chemistry award in 2012. Her postdoctoral appointments include research on fuel cells at Aalto University in Finland from 2012 to 2014 under Prof. Tanja Kallio, electrocatalytic synthesis of organic carbonates at Leiden University from 2014 to 2017 with Prof. Marc Koper, and a stint at the University of Copenhagen in 2017 with Prof. Jan Rosmeisl and Dr. Maria Escudero Escribano. From 2017 to 2019, she worked as a Junior Scientist at Avantium in Amsterdam, focusing on electrochemical conversion of CO2.

Figueiredo's research is centered on electrocatalysis and electro(catalytic)synthesis aimed at sustainable processes for producing high-value chemicals, such as fuels and organic molecules, from waste substrates including carbon dioxide and biomass. Her work emphasizes understanding, developing, and optimizing electrochemical reactions under practical, industrially relevant conditions to facilitate the industrial-scale application of electrochemistry. She received the ISE Travel Award for Young Electrochemists in 2015 and was a ROW Fellow at the Technical University of Munich in 2014. Key publications include "Elucidating the influence of secondary nitrogen precursors on the performance of Fe–N–C catalysts for proton exchange membrane fuel cells" in Energy Advances (2026), "Restructuring of shape-controlled Cu₂O catalysts during CO₂ electroreduction" in the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry (2026), "A comparative study of electrochemical CO₂ reduction on hydrothermally synthesized carbon nanosphere-supported Ni-, Cu-, and NiCu-hydroxide catalysts" in Catalysis Science and Technology (2026), "Cu-Ag interactions in bimetallic Cu-Ag catalysts enhance C₂+ product formation during electrochemical CO reduction" in Journal of Materials Chemistry A (2025), and "Editorial overview: Electrochemical energy conversion" in Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering (2025), where she served as a corresponding author. Through her contributions, Figueiredo advances sustainable chemical production and the transition to environmentally friendly industrial processes.