Alon Grinberg Dana
Assistant Prof. Alon Grinberg Dana
Wolfson Faculty of Chemical Engineering
Postdoctoral and Senior Postdoctoral research, 2015-2020, MIT
Ph.D., 2015, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Grand Technion Energy Program, Chemical Engineering. Dissertation: “Reactions of a Nitrogen-Based Alternative Fuel”
B.Sc. (Honors), 2010, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Biochemical Engineering
Assist. Prof. Alon Grinberg Dana was involved with GTEP since its establishment in 2007 as a B.Sc. student.
He is also the first student enrolled in the Grand Technion Energy Program (GTEP) interdisciplinary graduate studies program, when it was founded in 2010.
Today, he is coming full circle by returning to Technion and to GTEP as a faculty member. Grinberg Dana was affiliated with GTEP throughout his Master’s and PhD studies under the mentorship of Prof. Gideon S. Grader, the founding director of GTEP. Moreover, he received a scholarship for the first year of his postdoctoral research at MIT from the Ed Satell Foundation – one of GTEP’s main sponsors.
Grinberg Dana’s research interests focus on improving fuel utilization technologies and converting CO2 into an asset such as liquid fuels, as well as on combustion of alternative fuels, high-quality kinetic models for complex chemical systems, and developing automated computational chemistry tools. “Achieving renewable, secure energy sources and mitigating climate change are among the greatest challenges humankind is currently facing.”
Assistant Prof. Grinberg Dana’s new Fundamental and Applied Chemical Kinetics research group at Technion’s Wolfson Faculty of Chemical Engineering will mainly focus on developing systems with applications in the fuel and raw materials chemical sectors. The group’s research will be based on automated computational chemistry tools to generate high-quality predictive kinetic models for system optimization and will experimentally corroborate model predictions. The research is expected to yield numerous practical applications in other fields as well. For example, computer models will analyze different candidates for pharmaceutical trials that have similar biological functions and determine which drugs are more resistant to oxidation and have longer shelf lives.
As a Senior Postdoctoral Associate Researcher in Prof. William H. Green’s research group at MIT, Grinberg Dana developed groundbreaking software for predicting the time evolution of various chemical systems. He developed ARC, a software for automating quantum chemical calculations; T3 (“The Tandem Tool”), a software for automatically refining chemical kinetic models; and TCKDB, a free database for storing and sharing kinetics-relevant quantum calculations in the broad scientific chemical kinetics community. ARC is an innovative tool that supplants the need for exhausting calculations, and the software even includes sophisticated troubleshooting capabilities. His group will continue leading the development of all these computational tools from the Technion.
Grinberg Dana is also looking forward to teaching a course on Advanced Thermodynamics and is planning to develop a course on Computational Molecular Chemistry. “I am confident about my decision to return to Israel and to Technion, which is one of the world’s leading universities. There are many burning research questions that I am highly motivated to pursue.”
For more information: https://dana.net.technion.ac.il/