| David Zitoun | |
| Birth Date: | 29 June 1975 |
| Birth Place: | France |
| Citizenship: | Israeli |
| Field: | Chemistry, Nano-materials |
| Alma Mater: | University Toulouse III |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Bruno Chaudret |
| Academic Advisors: | Peidong Yang (University of California, Berkeley) |
David Zitoun (he|דוד זיתון) is an Israeli chemist and materials scientist.
David Zitoun[1] [2] obtained his M.Sc. (1999) in Physical chemistry from Ecole Normale Superieure, France, and a Ph.D. (2003) from the University Toulouse III, France, under the supervision of Bruno Chaudret, with a dissertation on the magnetism of clusters.[3] In 2003 he was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley with Prof. Peidong Yang, investigating the diluted magnetic semiconducting nanowires.[4] Between 2004 and 2009 he was a senior lecturer at Montpellier 2 University, France, and in 2009 he joined the Department of Chemistry at Bar-Ilan University (BIU) where he is currently a full professor and holds the position of the Head of the department.[5] Zitoun is a member of the Bar-Ilan Institute for Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials (BINA),[6] a member of the Israel National Research Center for Electrochemical Propulsion (INREP),[7] an associate editor of the Journal of Nanoparticle Research (Springer), a Panel Member of the FORMAS Funding Agency (Sweden),[8] and an Expert for the Horizon 2020 research program. He has also been a consultant for ICL-IP, PVNanoCell, and CENS Materials.
His current research[9] focuses on the investigation of the chemical synthesis of materials to promote renewable and green energies. Zitoun's lab has a high expertise in the wet synthesis of Nano-scale materials with the accent on the transition metals, their complexes, organometallic, metallic, and metal-oxide compounds. He developed new chemical routes using soluble organometallic[10] or metal-organic precursors[11] as an alternative to conventional colloidal chemistry and gas phase thin film deposition. The nanomaterials exhibit high activity for electrocatalysis in alkaline medium.[12] [13] Zitoun and colleagues were the first to introduce the use of electron magnetic measurements in post-mortem analyses of Li-ion batteries[14] and the first group to publish the operando electron magnetic measurements.[15] These in-situ measurements allowed proposing a new electrochemical mechanism for the high energy density anodic materials. David Zitoun has an active scientific collaboration with many world-renowned scientists, among which are Prof. Doron Aurbach, Prof. Zeev Zalevsky and Prof. Nicola Pinna.
David Zitoun is married to Keren Zitoun, a pharmacist with a thesis in music therapy. They immigrated to Israel in 2009[16] and have four children.