$2M NSF Grant for Self-Driving Labs Will Accelerate Discovery
A collaborative research team led by NC State University has received a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for its multidisciplinary work on self-driving laboratories (SDL).
The grant comes through the Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future program. According to the NSF, this submission cycle has been the most competitive to date.
“This NSF grant allows us to push the boundaries of how science is done,” said Milad Abolhasani, Alcoa Professor and University Faculty Scholar in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. He is the principal investigator for the grant, which involves researchers from NC State, Brown University and the University at Buffalo. Their research is at the forefront of developing research platforms powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics.
Abolhasani’s group will use this grant to create a collaborative ecosystem for discovering and optimizing semiconductor nanomaterials, which are critical components for next-generation energy technologies, by using SDLs developed by three different researchers across institutions.
“By combining AI, robotics and advanced experimentation across multiple labs, we can dramatically accelerate the pace of discovery while building a new model for collaborative materials research,” he said.
The four-year project aims to establish a blueprint for SDL networks, setting the stage for a new era of scientific discovery.
Abolhasani’s research efforts have earned him the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the 2024 American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Catalyst and Reaction Engineering Early Career Investigator Award, the Machine Learning in Chemical Sciences & Engineering Award from The Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation, the 2022 AIChE Nanoscale Science and Engineering Forum Young Investigator Award and recognition as one of the AIChE 35 Under 35 in 2020. He was recently named the recipient of the Allan P. Colburn Award from AIChE, one of the organization’s most prestigious honors.
This post was originally published in College of Engineering News.
