Dan graduated from Williams College in 2007 with a B.A. in Chemistry and English. In 2013, he obtained his Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry from Caltech under the guidance of Prof. Jonas Peters. He then joined the laboratory of Prof. R. David Britt at the University of California – Davis for his postdoctoral studies. In 2017 he joined MIT’s Department of Chemistry as an Assistant Professor and has since been promoted to Associate Professor.