Date: Tuesday 13 May 2025 – 15:00 (Europe/London)
Speaker: Jean-Francois Ayme, Research Fellow in Experimental Functional Materials Design at the University of Liverpool.
Abstract
In 2020, we showed that mobile robots could be used for closed-loop optimization of photocatalyst formulations, effectively automating the researcher, rather than the instruments. However, in that first study, the robot had no knowledge of the chemistry and it used a 'brute force' Bayesian optimization to discover more effective catalyst mixtures. Here we will describe our more recent work where the aim is to develop hypothesis-led searches; that is, to equip the robot with a knowledge of the chemistry that it is exploring. This study touches on a range of areas such as large language models and human-robot software interfaces that are more broadly relevant to digital chemistry.
Biography
Jean-Francois Ayme is a chemist specialising in supramolecular chemistry and automation for chemistry. His academic career includes research with Nobel Laureates J.-P. Sauvage (Strasbourg, MSc) and J.-M. Lehn (Strasbourg/KIT, Postdoc), and Professor D. Leigh (Manchester, PhD). Following time in industry at BASF, he returned to academia, working with Professor L. Cronin in Glasgow on automation of chemistry. Currently based in Professor A. Cooper's group, Jeff's focus is on the digitalisation and automation of chemistry."
