T. Alan Hatton is the Ralph Landau Professor and the Director of the David H. Koch School of Chemical Engineering Practice at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
[10] At the Practice School, students complete placements at industrial projects with international host companies, as well as taking on-campus academic courses.
[15] He has served as a co-editor of Colloids and Surfaces,[16] and is on the international advisory board of the Chinese Journal of Chemical Engineering.
His research interests include responsive surfactants and gels obtained by colloidal self-assembly, stimuli-responsive materials, chemically reactive fibers and fabrics, metal-organic frameworks for separations and catalysis, and synthesis and functionalization of magnetic nanoparticles and clusters.
[23] As of 2012, Hatton worked on electrochemically mediated methods of carbon capture and conversion which could be used to reduce emissions from power plants and industry and decrease greenhouse gases.
[24] As of 2015, T. Alan Hatton and Aly Eltayeb received funding to develop a commercial prototype for carbon capture and storage from the smokestacks of industrial and power plants that burn fossil fuels.
Then, building on the work of Michael Stern, the prototype passes the resulting solution through an electrochemical cell containing two electrically charged copper plates.
[25][26] As of 2016, Yogesh Surendranath and T. Alan Hatton received a Seed Fund Grant from the MIT Energy Initiative to investigate the possible cycling of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions into chemical fuel.
[27] With Xiao Su and others, Hatton has developed new methods of removing unwanted substances such as chemical waste, pesticides, and pharmaceuticals from water supplies.
Both positive and negative electrodes or plates can be coated with Faradaic materials, which are chemically "functionalized" to react with specific molecules.