Mircea Dinca

Background and Education

Mircea was born in Făgăraş - Romania, a 700-year old Tranyslvanian city, about 40 miles away from Dracula's Castle. He started studying Chemistry in 7-th grade and really enjoyed it. Having a dedicated teacher that did spectacular demonstrations with relatively limited regard for safety may have had something to do with that. Starting with the 8-th grade Mircea participated in the Chemistry Olympiads, which ultimately landed him a scholarship from Princeton University. Mircea moved to beautiful New Jersey in the Fall of 1999. As if not already studying abroad, in the Spring of 2001 Mircea also did a semester abroad at the University of Queensland in Brisbane - Australia. At Princeton, Mircea worked in the labs of Prof. Jeff Schwartz where he did not work with the Schwartz reagent. In the Fall of 2003, Mircea travelled West once again and enrolled in the Chemistry PhD program at the University of California - Berkeley, where he joined the laboratory of Prof. Jeff Long. In Jeff's group he worked on metal-organic framework chemistry, focusing on making new compounds that exhibit increased hydrogen adsorption capacity and stronger hydrogen binding for mobile hydrogen storage applications. Upon graduation in the summer of 2008, he joined Prof. Dan Nocera's group at MIT. In Dan's lab Mircea worked on the development and electrochemical study of novel electrocatalysts for oxygen evolution from water. In July 2010 Mircea was appointed as Assistant Professor at MIT, promoted to Associate Professor in 2015, with tenure in 2017, and Full Professor in 2020. He currently holds the W. M. Keck Chair as Professor of Energy. His group's research focuses on the functional chemistry of inorganic and metal-organic materials, with a current emphasis on porous materials and extended 1D vdW materials. Whenever he can, Mircea enjoys running, mushroom hunting, and making semi-functional things out of wood.