Assistant Professor Alon Grinberg Dana was the first student enrolled in GTEP’s interdisciplinary graduate studies program, and came full circle when he joined the Technion in September 2020 as the first GTEP faculty who did his Ph.D. training in this framework. He conducted his postdoctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he carved out a niche in developing novel software tools to predict the behavior of chemical systems.

His laboratory in the Wolfson Department of Chemical Engineering focuses on the challenge of quantitatively predicting the reactivity of various chemical systems over time, with applications such as predicting the desired composition of sustainable aviation fuels, estimating the shelf life of a new drug, and designing robust fuel cells. Using computational chemistry methods and high-quality chemical kinetic models, his predictive technology saves industry time and money by reducing the number of experiments needed to understand a new system.

Prof. Grinberg Dana received his bachelor’s and Ph.D. degrees at the Technion, and was then awarded a scholarship from the Ed Satell Foundation to support his first year of postdoctoral research at in the Green Group at MIT. Earning a fellowship from the Zuckerman STEM Leadership Program, he was able to extend his stay at MIT, working in the same lab with an even larger group of researchers. Additional funding for his research is provided by Technion and ATS supporters Ed Satell and Dr. George Elbaum.