Xiaorui Dong

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Graduate Student

E18-509

Email: xiaorui@mit.edu

I was born in Beijing, the capital of China, and lived there until I came to MIT. During high school, I gradually found my interests in chemistry and started to learn some college-level courses by myself. I still remember that a book named The Art of Writing Reasonable Organic Reaction Mechanisms I read at that time aroused my interest in reaction mechanisms, which lasts until today and shapes my decision to work on that topic during my PhD.

After high school, I attended Tsinghua University and got my B.E degree in chemical engineering and B.S degree in economics. During sophomore, I joined professor Jun Ge’s lab, working on enhancing the performance of enzyme-inorganic hybrid nanoflowers and enzyme-MOF composites. After that I worked as a summer intern in Texas A&M University with Professor Ugaz in 2016 to develop a viscometer based on image analysis. There, I wrote codes to achieved the automatically analysis and the convenience brought by automation left me deep impression on how computer can make research or life easier. For my senior thesis, I worked with Professor Kai Wang and successfully proposed a controllable synthetic strategy of gold nanoparticle using flow chemistry.

I became one of the PhD student in department of Chemical Engineering at MIT in 2017 and joined Professor Green’s group as I want to make efforts to improve the performance of Reaction Mechanism Generator (RMG) which perfectly matches my interest. Now I am mainly working on proposing detailed pyrolysis and combustion mechanisms for biofuels using RMG.