Conjugated polymers from artificial synapses to energy storage and electrocatalysis: what can they do and how do they work?
Conjugated polymers behave as semiconductors and find applications ranging from solar cells to neural probes, artificial synapses and biosensors. Additionally, their potential in electrochemical applications has recently been noted. As energy storage materials, conjugated polymers are promising as they can replace multiple elements of a standard electrode thanks to their multifunctionality. Similarly, conjugated polymers show promise as electrocatalysts in oxygen reduction reactions where they could replace precious metals and rare earths. Thus, conjugated polymers can behave as regular semiconductors or as electrochemical materials, which makes them unique. Indeed, one of the selling points of these materials is that they can in principle be designed de novo to perform desired functions. Despite their enormous potential, the structure-property relationships in conjugated polymers are far from understood. This gap, that is the connection for molecular structure to microstructure, is a major impediment to the rational design of new high-performance conjugated polymers. Structure-property relationships are further complicated by the fact that these materials are “dynamic” and change their structure at different length scales as they interact with electronic or ionic charges. I will describe our work over the years in attempting to tease out structure-property relationships in conjugated polymers using optical, electrical and electrochemical characterization, synchrotron-based x-ray diffraction and transmission electron microscopy.
Bio: Alberto Salleo is the Hong Seh and Vivian W. M. Lim Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford University. He currently serves as the Deputy Director for Science and Technology at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, one of the 17 Department of Energy National Laboratories. At SLAC he is responsible for the entire science and technology portfolio of the laboratory, from cosmology to attosecond science.
Salleo earned a Laurea in chemistry from the University of Rome La Sapienza and an M.S. and Ph.D. in materials science from UC Berkeley. He was a post-doc and then a staff scientist at Xerox PARC from 2001 until 2005. Salleo joined Stanford as an assistant professor in 2006. He rose through the ranks and was eventually promoted to full professor in 2019. He served as chair of the materials science department between 2019 and 2025. Alberto won an NSF Career Award as well as the SPIE Early Career Award and he has been a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher in Materials Science since 2015. At Stanford he won the Tau Beta Pi Award for teaching in the School of Engineering and the Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching, Stanford’s highest teaching honor bestowed to two tenure track faculty every year across the whole university. Alberto is a Knight of the Italian Republic for his service to the Italian scientific community in the U.S. and he is a Fellow of the Materials Research Society, the European Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Inventors and the AAAS, as well as a member of Academia Europaea.