William H. Green
Director, MITEI
Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering
Research interests
Alternative fuels and engines, Predicting reaction kinetics for design of energy devices
Research areas
William H. Green is the director of the MIT Energy Initiative and the Hoyt C. Hottel Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. Green’s energy research has focused on hydrogen carriers, ammonia production and use in co-firing power plants, sustainable fuels, decarbonization of long-haul transportation, and techno-economic analysis of energy systems. Green serves as director of MITEI’s in-progress study on the Future of Fuels: Pathways to Sustainable Transportation and as co-director of the Consistent Lifecycle and Economic Assessment Recommendations (CLEAR) initiative being led by MIT for the international engineering community.
Green is a world leader in chemical kinetics, reaction engineering, prediction of chemical reactions and properties, and in development of related software. He has led many combined experimental/modeling research projects related to fuels, combustion, pyrolysis, and oxidative stability. He also developed computer methods to predict the behavior of complicated reacting mixtures as documented in the open-source Reaction Mechanism Generator software package, an AI expert system for reactive chemistry. His group has also devised machine-learning methods and software such as Chemprop, among the most popular open-source chemistry software on GitHub. Green also invents and analyzes technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and two of his greenhouse-gas-emission-reduction inventions are now being commercialized. Green has published more than 360 journal papers, and his work has been cited more than 30,000 times.
He earned his BA at Swarthmore College and his PhD in physical chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. After postdocs at Cambridge University and University of Pennsylvania, Green worked at ExxonMobil for seven years before joining the MIT faculty in 1997. He is a Fellow of the AAAS and of the Combustion Institute. Green has also been honored with the Jürgen Warnatz Gold Medal of the Combustion Institute, the American Chemical Society’s Glenn Award in Energy & Fuel Chemistry, and the AIChE’s Wilhelm Award in Reaction Engineering.
