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Tonio Buonassisi

Contact Info

room 35-213

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

77 Massachusetts Avenue

Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139

Administrative Contact Foley, Douglas E. 35-211

Education

  • 2001

    UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME

    B.S., Applied Physics
  • 2006

    UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-BERKELEY

    Ph.D., Applied Science & Technology

Research Interests

  • Sustainable Materials, High-throughput Experiments, Scientific Machine Learning, Process Optimization & Scale-Up

Bio

"Tonio Buonassisi is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is pioneering the application of artificial intelligence to develop new materials for societally beneficial applications. His research in solar photovoltaics and technoeconomic analysis assisted technology developments in dozens of companies, earning him a US Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and a Google Faculty Award. He directs the Accelerated Materials Lab for Sustainability at MIT, served as founding director for the Accelerated Materials Development for Manufacturing Programme in Singapore, and co-founded startup Xinterra as well as the non-for-profit Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems. A recipient of the prestigious MIT Everett Moore Baker Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, his passion for education is evidenced by the >179k views of his OpenCourseware/YouTube PV lectures series, and a recent YouTube video series focused on the application of AI to materials research, entitled “Accelerated Materials Development for Manufacturing.”

Online Data

Honors + Awards

  • 2022 Highly Cited Researcher, Clarivate
  • 2016 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE)
  • 2015 Google Faculty Award
  • 2015 Everett Moore Baker Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (MIT teaching award selected entirely by undergraduates).
  • 2012 CAREER Award, National Science Foundation
  • 2012 BOSCH Energy Research Network Award
  • 2010 MIT-Deshpande Innovation Grant
  • 2005 European Materials Research Society (E-MRS) Young Scientist Presentation Award
  • 2004 German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Graduate Research Fellowship