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 faculty in September 2020. He conducted postdoctoral work at MIT, where he carved out a niche in developing novel and scalable, low-carbon energy alternatives to address the global environmental crisis.

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 pollutant levels in alternative fuels or predicting the shelf life of a new drug. 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. Dana is head of the Israeli Sustainable Aviation Fuel (iSAF) Knowledge Center. He 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 MIT in the Green Group. 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. In addition to support from American Technion Society supporter Ed Satell, he has also received generous funding from ATS leader Dr. George Elbaum.