Feature
Advanced materials are needed in almost all aspects of our lives. Healthcare, energy generation, data storage, pollution control – they all require advanced materials. The current ‘trial and error’ method of discovering new materials is on the road to being revolutionised thanks to Southampton research.
A MATERIAL WORLD The process of discovering new materials can take years. It’s laborious, time-consuming and potentially limited by scientists’ existing knowledge and expectations. Plus it’s often a case of trial and error. The ADAM project is stepping in to disrupt that. The €10 million research project is on its way to automating materials discovery, combining pioneering computational methods with automation and robotics to overcome many barriers to fast and uninhibited breakthroughs. Graeme Day, Professor of Chemical Modelling, is leading the ADAM (Autonomous Discovery of Advanced Materials) project, which kicked off in 2020 and is funded for six years. He’s working alongside Professor Andy Cooper from the University of Liverpool and Professor Kerstin Thurow from the University of Rostock in Germany. The first members of the project team, which will reach 20 researchers at the three institutions, have been recruited over the first few months of the project. Computational chemistry modelling and machine learning expertise at Southampton will be combined 28
