Session Abstract
Materials underpin every technology: from defining entire historical ages to enabling modern society. Steel made cities and transportation possible, polymers transformed medicine and consumer goods, and advanced electronic materials are now driving the transition to a sustainable energy future. Yet materials innovation and engineering have long relied on slow and expensive, empirical trial-and-error. Advances in high-throughput quantum mechanical computation, large-scale data curation and autonomous labs are now driving materials science into the fourth paradigm of science: data-driven materials design.
Berkeley’s Materials Project leverages supercomputing, first-principles theory, and open data infrastructure to compute and disseminate properties for over 200,000 materials and millions of derived quantities, supporting a global community of more than 600,000 users. This data foundation has catalyzed rapid advances in machine-learning models for predicting materials properties and synthesizability. However, truly accelerating materials innovation requires closing the loop between prediction and experiment through data-guided synthesis, rapid testing, and systematic capture of both successful and unsuccessful outcomes. Achieving this demands a fundamental shift in scientific practice; from publishing isolated narratives to prioritizing comprehensive data capture, curation, and analysis.
Speaker Bio
Kristin A. Persson is the Daniel M. Tellep Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a Senior Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She is the Director and founder of the Materials Project (materialsproject.org) which is a world-leading resource for materials data, design and the training of machine learning algorithms. Among other recognitions, she has received the Cyril Stanley Smith Award and she is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science and of the US National Academy of Engineering. She was named an Office of Science Distinguished Scientist Fellow in 2024. She holds several patents in the clean energy space and has co-authored more than 300 peer-reviewed publications.