Faculty Title:
Assistant Professor in Materials Processing,
Jeffrey Cheah Career Development Professor at MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Education:
2011 PhD Universidad del Salamanca,
2006 Liceciado en Quimica. Universidad de Salamanca
Department:
- Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE)
Room:
13-5037
Phone Number:
617-253-5632
Email:
Faculty Bio:
Rafael Gomez-Bombarelli (Rafa) is the Jeffrey Cheah Career Development Professor at MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering since 2018.
Rafa received BS, MS, and PhD (2011) degrees in chemistry from Universidad de Salamanca (Spain), followed by postdoctoral work at Heriot-Watt (UK) and Harvard Universities, and a stint in industry at Kyulux North America. He has been awarded the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation "Machine Learning in the Chemical Sciences and Engineering Awards" in 2021 and the Google Faculty Research Award in 2019. He was co-founder of Calculario a Harvard spinout company, was Chief Learning Officer of ZebiAI, a drug discovery startup acquired by Relay Therapeutics in 2022 and serves as consultant and scientific advisor to multiple startups
Research Areas:
Research Summary:
His works aims to fuse machine learning and atomistic simulations for designing materials and their transformations. Through collaborations at MIT and beyond, they develop new practical materials such as heterogeneous thermal catalysts (zeolites), transition metal oxide electrocatalysts, therapeutic peptides, organic electronics for displays, electrolytes for batteries. By embedding domain expertise and experimental results into their models, alongside physics-based knowledge, the Learning Matter Lab designs materials that can be realized in the lab and scaled to practical applications.