Professor Jacqueline Cole, University of Cambridge

Research Chairs and Senior Research Fellowships 2018-19

The world needs new materials to stimulate the chemical industry in key sectors of our economy: environment and sustainability, information storage, efficiency of chemical processes. Yet, nearly all functional materials are still discovered by ‘trial-and-error’, whose lack of predictability affords a major materials bottleneck to technological innovation. The emerging field of data-driven molecular engineering offers a prospective solution to this problem; thereby, systematic molecular design and engineering strategies are encoded into algorithms that search through massive chemical datasets to discover a material that suits a bespoke application. Such data-science approaches to materials discovery are only just becoming possible, given recent advances in artificial intelligence, rapid rises in high-performance-computing capacities, and changes in government legislation that regulates the open-access of scientific data. The US government, under Obama, also promoted such approaches via the Materials Genome Initiative, which aimed to reduce the average 20 year ‘molecule-to-market’ timeframe in industry. This Fellowship will develop data-driven materials-by-design capabilities to accelerate the discovery of new chemicals for photovoltaic, magnetic and catalytic applications. This will be achieved by exploiting the latest advances in database auto-generation tools developed by the Molecular Engineering group at Cambridge, and its materials discovery capabilities through rational molecular design and experimental validation. The Fellowship will partner Cambridge with two sponsors: BASF and the UK neutron source, ISIS. The Fellowship will aid ISIS in its neutron data-enrichment programme for materials science. It will help BASF drive their digitalization in R&D priorities to accelerate knowledge-based solutions for chemical engineering

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Personal website: https://www.phy.cam.ac.uk/directory/colej