Mircea Dincă obtained BA and PhD degrees in Chemistry from Princeton University and UC Berkeley, respectively, and was a postdoctoral scholar at MIT. His group is interested in the development of new materials for alternative and renewable energy technologies. Mircea was awarded the US DOE Young Investigator Award, and the TR-35, 3M Non-Tenured Faculty, Sloan, and Cottrell Awards.
The Dincă group is interested in developing new materials for adsorption-based cooling applications. Adsorption-based cooling devices can in principle function with zero electricity input, which makes them particularly desirable in remote locations that are not connected to the grid, as in rural India, or in mobile applications such as vaccine delivery and milk collection. The most important factor preventing the wide-spread deployment of miniaturized adsorption-based coolers is the lack of performant materials that adsorb sufficient water and work in a desired temperature/humidity working range. We aim to produce such materials from a new class of adsorbents known as metal-organic frameworks and work with engineers to deliver a prototype device on an aggressive timeline.