ACS AMA: Hi Reddit! My name is Mircea Dincă, a professor of chemistry at MIT. Ask me anything about metal-organic framework materials!

Abstract

ACS AMA I am Mircea Dincă, and I am an Associate Professor of Chemistry at MIT, leading a lab focused on the design and synthesis of new materials for energy and environmental applications. In particular, we are interested in developing a class of materials called metal-organic frameworks, which are very porous. Most recently, we have shown that these "super-sponges" can adsorb record amounts of water, and that one can use this high water uptake to "suck" moisture from the atmosphere and deliver fresh water in water-stressed dry areas of low natural humidity. This work was recently published in ACS Central Science under the title “Record Atmospheric Fresh Water Capture and Heat Transfer with a Material Operating at the Water Uptake Reversibility Limit” and is available free of charge for readers at: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acscentsci.7b00186 This paper is just one example of many ways in which we use metal-organic frameworks for renewable energy applications, including record-setting supercapacitors and smart windows, or for heterogeneous catalysis of importance for large industrial processes such as ethylene dimerization, used in polyethylene production. For an overview of the many exciting opportunities offered by metal-organic frameworks as an up-and-coming class of advanced materials, check out our accessible Outlook on this field, also published recently in ACS Central Science “Grand Challenges and Future Opportunities for Metal–Organic Frameworks” http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acscentsci.7b00197 By way of background, I was born in Romania, and moved to the US for my undergraduate degree, which I obtained at Princeton University in 2003. I completed my graduate work at UC Berkeley and graduated with a PhD in Inorganic Chemistry in 2008. Following 2 years as a Postdoctoral Scholar at MIT, I started my independent research group at MIT in 2010, where I have been an Associate Professor since 2015. For my group's research I have been awarded a Sloan Fellowship, a Cottrell Award, and a Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award. In 2016, I was selected for NSF's Alan T. Waterman Award. Ask me anything about our work on metal-organic frameworks and its relationship to modern energy or environmental research! I will be back at 1pm EDT (11am PDT, 5pm UTC) to answer your questions. MD logged in, June 20, 12:58pm, EST. Thank you for your questions reddit! MD out June 20, 2:03pm, EST.