Automation for Chemistry                                  
                                                                        

Milad Abolhasani is the ALCOA Professor, a University Faculty Scholar, and the Director of the Graduate Program in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at North Carolina State University. He also serves as the Director of Accelerated Technologies within NC State's Integrative Sciences Initiative. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 2014. Prior to joining NC State University, he was an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT (2014-2016). At NC State University, Dr. Abolhasani leads a multidisciplinary research group that studies self-driving labs tailored toward accelerated discovery, development, and manufacturing of advanced functional materials and molecules using fluidic micro-processors. Dr. Abolhasani has received numerous awards and fellowships, including NSF CAREER Award, Dreyfus Award for Machine Learning in the Chemical Sciences & Engineering, AIChE Catalysis & Reaction Engineering Early Career Investigator Award, AIChE 35 Under 35, Scialog Fellowship, AIChE NSEF Young Investigator Award, I &EC Research 2021 Class of Influential Researchers, and Emerging Investigator recognition from Nanoscale, Lab on a Chip, Reaction Chemistry & Engineering, and Digital Discovery.

Dr. Linna An graduated from the Dept. Chemistry, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), where she conducted undergraduate research on molecular imaging under the guidance of Prof. Gaolin Liang (subsequently at SEU). She then pursued a Ph.D. in biochemistry in the Wilfred A. van der Donk lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). During her doctoral studies, Dr. An used bioinformatics to uncover new biosynthetic gene clusters and characterize their synthesized products. This approach aimed to discover novel drugs from nature—including antibiotics—and led to the successful identification of several previously unknown potential antibiotics. Notably, she revealed a unique substrate-assisted bond formation mechanism in an new enzyme family (An, Nat. Chem. Biol. 2018).
After PhD, Dr. An joined the David Baker lab at the University of Washington (UW) as a protein designer, focusing on deep learning-based methods for creating functional proteins. Her primary interest centered on small molecule-protein interactions, a critical challenge for ligand-related engineering. In 2020, she proposed the concept of generating proteins with highly shape-complementary interfaces for binding ligands—a seemingly straightforward idea that ultimately took 3.5 years to realize, facilitated by numerous tool optimizations.
Collaborating with Dr. Derrick R. Hicks and Dr. Dmitri Zorine (now at ZipBio, Inc.), Dr. An co-developed an AlphaFold2-based “hallucination” method to efficiently generate diverse pocket-containing proteins (An, Hicks, Zorine, et al., Nat. Struct. Mol. Biol. 2023). These proteins were subsequently designed to bind against specific ligands  (An, Science, 2024). Through a combination of computational docking and high-throughput screening, she identified protein-ligand pairs with excellent shape complementarity and advanced their binding affinities to the nanomolar range. The pipeline produced binders for a variety of ligands, including the flexible, polar molecule methotrexate—an unprecedented achievement. These de novo binders were further repurposed as sensors and employed in ligand-specific nanopore applications, as well as in chemical-induced dimerization (An, Science, 2024).
Dr. An is currently exploring how to leverage her small molecule-protein manipulation platform to engineer enzymes, and sensing systems. Ultimately, Dr. An aspires to build or join a collaborative team in both academia and industry to tackle questions of sensing and enzyme domestication.

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.

Jason Hein is a Professor at the University of British Columbia and Adjunct Professor at the University of Bergen, Norway. He completed his Ph.D. with Phil Hultin at the University of Manitoba in 2005, moving to become an NSERC PDF fellowship with Barry Sharpless and then senior research associate with Donna Blackmond at Scripps Research. In 2011 he started his independent research program at the University of California, Merced, joining the University of British Columbia in 2015, where he was promoted to Professor in 2024. His internationally recognized work in automated kinetic reaction analysis has advanced reaction discovery and optimization, yielding key mechanistic insights into catalytic processes. His work has been recognized though the ACS Young Investigators Prize (2015), NSERC Discovery Accelerator (2021) and the R. U. Lemieux Award (2025).

Jason has been very active outside of his academic role. In 2020 he founded Telescope Innovations, a chemical technology company aiming to translate academic research into practical solutions. In 2021, he became Associate Editor for Digital Discoveries, an innovative new journal with the Royal Society of Chemistry. He is a founding member of the Acceleration Consortium based at the University of Toronto, driving advancements in self-driving laboratories and digital 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.

Miriam holds a degree in pharmacy from the University of Technology Braunschweig. Following her diploma thesis in biochemistry, she embarked on her PhD journey in 2013 under the supervision of Prof. Knut Baumann, focusing on cheminformatics. Her research primarily revolved around class-probability estimation of machine learning methods and their impact on applicability domain estimation. After completing her PhD, she pursued further education to become a specialist pharmacist in analytical chemistry. In 2017, Miriam transitioned to BASF as a computational toxicologist, where she engaged in various projects concerning the (eco)-toxicological profiling of compounds, as well as predicting physico-chemical properties and bioactivity. She also contributed to synthesis planning and de-novo molecule design initiatives, while actively collaborating with various universities. Currently, she leads the Cheminformatics team at BASF and serves as a lecturer at Provadis Technical University, teaching courses on cheminformatics and experimental design. Additionally, Miriam has served as the deputy chair of the Computer in Chemistry division of the Society of German Chemists (GDCh) since 2025.

Jolene Reid is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia, where she leads a research group focused on catalysis, cheminformatics, and machine learning for reaction prediction, catalyst screening, and process and structure optimization. She collaborates with industry partners to develop computational tools that accelerate chemical innovation.

She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, integrating experiments and computations to study organocatalysis. She then joined the University of Utah as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow with Professor Matthew Sigman, focusing on statistical modeling of organic molecules and chemical reactions.

Dr. Reid has received prestigious awards, including the Amgen Young Investigator Award (2024) and Scialog Fellowship in Automating Chemical Laboratories (2023), and has published over 40 papers in leading journals.

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.

Professor Tejs Vegge is Head of the section for Autonomous Materials Discovery at DTU Energy, Technical University of Denmark, and the Director of the 13-year and $45M Danish National Research Foundation “Pioneer Center for Accelerating P2X Materials Discovery” (CAPeX). He is an expert in computational and AI-accelerated discovery of advanced battery materials, electrocatalysts, and next-generation energy storage solutions. Prof. Vegge has published more than 235 papers on accelerating the discovery and innovation process of clean energy materials. His approaches are fundamental in nature but maintain a clear focus on scalability and commercial viability.

Prof. Vegge is a pioneer in developing transdisciplinary approaches and workflows for computer- and AI-accelerated discovery of nanostructured catalysts for Power2X, battery materials, and electrochemical interfaces. He has pioneered the work on predictive atomic-scale characterization and inverse design of energy materials directly for their industrial operating conditions, enabling the transition from model systems to complex materials and systems for sustainable production and storage of renewable energy in batteries, e-fuels, and e-chemicals.

This includes coupling quantum chemical calculation at the density functional theory (DFT) level, experimental techniques such as X-ray diffraction, and electrochemical characterization, which have provided groundbreaking insights and understanding of catalysts in their active state. His work on the integration of DFT and uncertainty-aware machine learning (ML) techniques has had a particular impact on the ability to describe, understand, and accurately predict reactions and dynamic processes that occur at electrochemical liquid-solid interfaces at much longer time- and length-scales, as well as methods for determining and assigning uncertainties to quantum chemical calculations and ML models for predicting chemical reaction rates.

Prof. Vegge is a High-level member of the European Commission’s Technology Council for Advanced Materials and the High-level group on Advancing Science through AI & AI through Science, and has previously served as a member of the Danish Government’s Commission for the Green Conversion of Passenger Cars (2019-2021), Prof. Vegge also contributed his scientific understanding of battery materials development to enhance the scientific content in the public debate and the political decision-making process. He is also a co-founder (2021) and member of the board of the deep green tech startup PhaseTree (www.phasetree.ai), which provides a cloud-based multi-scale materials design platform for the accelerated design of clean energy materials.

Prof. Vegge has established and leads two of the world’s largest international and interdisciplinary consortia on developing “Materials Acceleration Platforms” (MAPs) or self-driving laboratories (SDLs) for accelerated materials discovery, i.e., CAPeX and the large-scale Battery Interface Genome–Materials Acceleration Platform (BIG-MAP) initiative under BATTERY 2030+. In 2019, the global initiative Mission Innovation awarded him the Champion Award for this work.

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. 

Dr. Jin Zhang, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Boya Chair Professor at Peking University, is currently serving as Vice President of Peking University and Dean of Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School. He is the recipient of the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars, Distinguished Professor of the Chang Jiang Scholars Program of the Ministry of Education, Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and is selected for the “Ten Thousand Talents Plan” Innovation Leading Talent by the Organization Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. Prof. Jin Zhang has long been devoted to the research of controllable preparation, characterization methods and applications of carbonene materials, and has been committed to advancing the research paradigm revolution by AI technology in chemistry and materials science. He has published over 380 papers in SCI journals such as Nature and Science, and holds more than 40 authorized patents. He has been awarded the Second Prize of the National Natural Science Award of China (twice).

Prof. Tong-Yi Zhang is the founding dean of the Materials Genome Institute, Shanghai University, the founding director of the Materials Genome Engineering division in the Chinese Materials Research Society (CMRS), the founding director of the Guangzhou Municipal Key Laboratory of Materials Informatics, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), and the founding Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Materials Informatics. He is doing his best to promote Materials Genome Engineering, Materials/Mechanics Informatics, and AI4S and AI4materials, especially, materials AI labs and materials AI computations.