While lithium based battery technologies are becoming increasingly widespread in our energy landscape, both in electric vehicles and grid scale storage, there is a continued need to increase energy density, reduce costs, and improve the sustainability of their manufacturing. In this presentation, I will discuss recent progress in our group toward improving the precision with which interphases can be designed to enable high energy density and low cost storage.

Self-driving laboratories can compress years of materials discovery into weeks. Instead of relying on trial-and-error, they use algorithms to learn from each experiment and decide what to try next. When experiments are expensive and budgets are limited, choosing the next experiment well can have a large impact on the quality of the material ultimately discovered. This event will present results from a recent benchmark of 46 data-driven optimization solvers on 502 problems, ranging from one to 300 dimensions and spanning a wide variety of mathematical behavior.

Closed-loop discovery of functional molecules represents a new paradigm to new materials discovery. However, so far, AI-driven closed-loop discovery approaches have rarely yielded new chemical insight. I am leading a team to address this challenge under the Molecule Maker Lab Institute, one of the first AI Institutes in US. We connect autonomous synthesis, autonomous device printing and testing, and machine learning in a closed loop to drive molecular design of light harvesting small molecules towards high photostability.

Electrostatic interactions can be used in the self-assembly of a wide range of responsive, bioinspired soft materials ranging from dehydrated thin films, fibers, and bulk solids to dense, polymer-rich liquid complex coacervates, as well as more complex hierarchical structures such as micelles and hydrogels. This responsiveness can include swelling and dissolution or solidification, which can be harnessed to facilitate encapsulation and the subsequent fabrication of functional materials. We draw inspiration from biomolecular condensates, which utilize liquid-liquid phase separation to create transient compartments in cells.

The innate immune response must coordinate diverse cell populations to eliminate pathogens, heal wounds, and maintain tissue homeostasis. This coordination depends on dynamic communication between immune cells and their surrounding tissue environment, yet even subtle disruptions in these interactions can drive chronic inflammation and contribute to diseases including cancer, cardiovascular disease, fibrosis, and autoimmunity. As immunotherapies continue to transform the treatment of disease, a central challenge remains: understanding how innate immune cells integrate complex environmental cues to execute precise, context-dependent functions.