Automation for Chemistry                                  
                                                                        

Alán Aspuru-Guzik is a professor of Chemistry and Computer Science at the University of Toronto and is also the Canada 150 Research Chair in Theoretical Chemistry and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute. He is a CIFAR Lebovic Fellow co-directing the Accelerated Decarbonization program. Alán also holds a Google Industrial Research Chair in Quantum Computing. Alán is the director of the Acceleration Consortium, a University of Toronto-based strategic initiative that aims to gather researchers from industry, government, and academia around pre-competitive research topics related to the lab of the future.

Alán began his independent career at Harvard University in 2006 and was a Full Professor at Harvard University from 2013-2018. He received his B.Sc. from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1999 and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004, where he was also a postdoctoral fellow from 2005-2006.

Alán conducts research in the interfaces of quantum information, machine learning and chemistry. He was a pioneer in the development of algorithms and experimental implementations of quantum computers and quantum simulators dedicated to chemical systems. He has studied the role of quantum coherence in the transfer of excitonic energy in photosynthetic complexes and has accelerated the discovery by calculating organic semiconductors, organic photovoltaic energy, organic batteries and organic light-emitting diodes. He has worked on molecular representations and generative models for the automatic learning of molecular properties. Currently, Alán is interested in automation and "autonomous" chemical laboratories for accelerating scientific discovery.Among other recognitions, he received the Google Focused Award for Quantum Computing, the Sloan Research Fellowship, The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar award, and was selected as one of the best innovators under the age of 35 by the MIT Technology Review. He is an elected fellow of the American Physical Society, an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and received the Early Career Award in Theoretical Chemistry from the American Chemical Society. Alán appeared as one of the top 100 most powerful Canadians in 2024 by the Maclean’s Magazine under the AI Category.

Christoph J. Brabec received his PhD (1995) from Linz University, Aus-tria. After a postdoc period under Serdar Sariciftci and Alan Heeger, he joined the SIEMENS research labs (project leader) in 2001, Konarka in 2004 (CTO), Erlangen University (full professor) in 2009, ZAE Bayern e.V. (scientific director, board member) in 2010, Interdisciplinary Center for Nanostructured Films (spokesman) in 2013, became director at FZ Jülich (IEK-11) in 2018 and honorary professor at the University of Gro-ningen as well in 2018. Since 2023 he is the spokesperson of the Energy Campus Nürnberg. His research interests include all aspects of solution processing organic, hybrid and inorganics semiconductor devices with a focus on photovoltaics and renewable energy systems, for which he was honoured as “Highly Cited Researcher” for the last 12 years. He has published over 100 patents and a total of 1000 articles, about 850 of them peer-reviewed, and received more than 100.000 citations.

Dr. Martin Burke is the May and Ving Lee Professor for Chemical Innovation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the founding Director of the Molecular Maker Lab and a co-founder of the Molecule Maker Lab Institute. He also helped launch the Carle Illinois College of Medicine and served as its inaugural Associate Dean of Research.

Burke discovered chemistry that machines can do. His lab specifically pioneered the modular synthesis of small molecules with MIDA/TIDA boronate building blocks, an approach that is friendly to automation, non-specialists, and AI. More than 300 of these building blocks are now commercially available, and they have been used by hundreds of other labs worldwide to help identify many different types of natural products, pharmaceuticals, herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, diagnostic probes, catalysts, anti-corrosive coatings, quantum dots, carbohydrate sensors, and a wide range of materials, collectively yielding >1000 publications including >300 patents. In his own lab, Burke leveraged this modular chemistry approach to develop the field of molecular prosthetics yielding new drug candidates for cystic fibrosis (now in clinical trials) and anemia, define the sterol sponge mechanism by which glycosylated polyene macrolide natural products kill eukaryotic cells which led to renal sparing antifungal candidates for treating invasive fungal infections (now in clinical trials), and to enable AI-guided closed-loop discovery of top-in-class organic lasers and mechanistic insights underlying the stability of organophotovoltaic materials. Leveraging the broad potential of this modular approach, Burke (co)-founded multiple biotechnology companies, including REVOLUTION Medicines, Sfunga Therapeutics (now Elion Therapeutics), and cystetic Medicines, which have collectively advanced 7 drug candidates into clinical trials.

Burke is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and American Society for Clinical Investigation, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is also a winner of the ACS Cope Scholar Award, ACS Elias J. Corey Award in Organic Synthesis, Hirata Gold Medal, Mukaiyama Award, Presidential Medallion from the University of Illinois, and ACS Nobel Laureate Signature Award for Graduate Education in Chemistry. He has also been recognized many times as a Teacher Ranked as Excellent by the University of Ilinois.

Nessa Carson received Master’s degrees in synthesis and catalysis from Oxford University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She started out as a synthetic chemist for AMRI, then moved within the company to run the high-throughput automation facility for Eli Lilly in Windlesham, working across discovery and process chemistry, then in high-throughput reaction optimization at Pfizer and then Syngenta. Nessa moved to AstraZeneca Early Chemical Development in 2022 as Digital Champion, focussing on digital transformation and making life easier for scientists. She was awarded the Salters' Institute Centenary Award for early-career chemists with the potential to make an outstanding long-term contribution to industrial chemistry.

I am interested in the development of catalytic reactions and associated technologies that are relevant to the chemical industries. I love to apply engineering and data-driven approaches in our research, including flow chemistry, in situ kinetic studies to support reaction mechanisms, and process-enhancing tools for sustainability. In 2019, I founded the ROAR Facility at Imperial College London White City campus, comprising of high-throughput robotic reaction platforms to support data-enabled research. In 2023, I co-led (with BASF) a successful bid for an EPSRC Prosperity Partnership: “Innovative Continuous Manufacturing for Industrial Chemicals (IConIC)”, including partners across the chemical value chain, to design innovative flow chemistry processes for R&D labs and high-value manufacturing. A new spin-out company (SOLVE) was launched in April 2024, based on novel continuous flow techniques developed in our laboratory. In late 2024, I have taken up a part-time appointment as the Scientific Director at an A*Star Institute in Singapore, leading a taskforce on ‘Lab of the Future’.

Associate Professor Kedar Hippalgaonkar’s research interests are in AI-driven solid-state materials-by-design. He holds a joint appointment as an associate professor with the Materials Science and Engineering Department at NTU, and as a Principal Scientist at IMRE, A*STAR. He was the Scientific Director of the Multi-PI S$25M Accelerated Materials Development for Manufacturing (AMDM) program from 2018 – 2024, and S$10M Materials Generative Design and Testing Framework program (Mat-GDT) from 2024-2027. Leading a group of >30 members, he has demonstrated clear areas of advancement in the discovery of new functional materials, AI and robotics for accelerated materials discovery, and advancing fundamental knowledge in inequilibrium charge and phonon scattering. His scientific contributions in the materials-by-design space have established a framework for the rapid discovery of materials and new physics, which is now being utilised globally in data-driven research. His commitment to translating scientific research into tangible real-world applications is exemplified by his role as the Co-founder and Senior Scientific Advisor of a startup – Xinterra, Inc. As a contributing member of the newly established Acceleration Consortium at the University of Toronto, Kedar collaborates with an international community of scientists dedicated to the creation of materials acceleration platforms. These platforms are pivotal in unlocking new discoveries in molecules and materials, further expanding the horizon of scientific understanding.

Tanja Junkers graduated with a PhD degree in physical chemistry from Goettigen University in Germany in 2006, having worked on the determination of kinetic rate coefficients for radical reactions during polymerizations. In the two years that followed, she was research associate at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, shifting her focus more and more towards synthetic polymer chemistry. Between 2008 and the beginning of 2010 she was a senior research scientist at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany in the group of Prof. Christopher Barner-Kowollik. Early 2010 she was then appointed professor at Hasselt University in Belgium, where she founded the Polymer Reaction Design group. In January 2018 she joined Monash University as full professor, focusing on her work on continuous flow polymerizations, (nano)particle formation and design of complex precision polymers. Today, her work focuses on automation and digitalization of chemical synthesis with the aim to build databases for advanced machine learning applications. Tanja Junkers is further an associate editor of the RSC journal Chemical Science and a member of the IUPAC Polymer Division.

Peter H. Seeberger, a chemist, was a tenured professor at MIT and ETH Zurich before becoming director at the Max-Planck Institute in Potsdam in 2009. Since 2021, he is in addition a Vice President of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and since 2023 the Founding Director of the Center for the Transformation of Chemistry (CTC) that received initial funding of €1.25 billion. His research spanning topics from engineering to immunology has been documented in >690 journal articles and >60 patent families and was recognized with >40 international awards.

Peter Seeberger supports open access publishing as the Editor-in-Chief of the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry. He is a co-founder of the Tesfa-Ilg Foundation that works in Ethiopia and several successful companies.

Aron Walsh holds the Chair of Materials Design at Imperial College London. He was awarded his PhD in Chemistry from Trinity College Dublin (Ireland) and completed a postdoctoral position at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (USA). His research combines computational technique development and applications at the interface between solid-state chemistry and physics. He was awarded the EU-40 prize from the Materials Research Society for his work on the theory of solar energy materials, as well as the Corday-Morgan Prize from the Royal Society of Chemistry for his contributions to the predictive modelling of organic-inorganic solids. He is featured on the Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers List and is an Associate Editor for the Journal of the American Chemical Society covering energy materials and artificial intelligence.