Profile

Manuel Nunes da Ponte was born in Goa, India, in 1949, with Portuguese nationality. He obtained his PhD (1977) in Chemical Engineering from Técnico/ University of Lisbon. He was visiting student at Oxford University (1975-76), and visiting Associate Professor at Cornell University (1983/84).
His research interests are focused Sustainable Chemistry, in particular on applications of Supercritical Carbon Dioxide and Ionic Liquids to separations and chemical reaction, and, in recent times, to Carbon Dioxide chemical and electrochemical reduction to fuels. He published about 160 papers in refereed scientific journals, and close to 70 papers in scientific proceedings or book chapters. He is the inventor of 6 patents and he presented 30 plenary and invited communications in international scientific symposia.
His career developed at NOVA, at the School of Science and Technology, but also at ITQB Antonio Xavier, NOVA’s largest research institute, where he was Director from 1999 to 2002.  He coordinated the MIT-Portugal Doctoral Program on Bioengineering Systems (2005-2014), and he was chairman of the EUREKA Initiative High Level Group during the 2008/09 Portuguese Chairmanship. He has launched in 2013 the start-up Zeyton Nutraceuticals, to produce olive extracts using clean technologies.