Evan Walter Clark Spotte-Smith joins ChemE faculty

Evan Walter Clark Spotte-Smith (they/them) will join the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University as an assistant professor of chemical engineering, beginning in the fall of 2025.

Spotte-Smith will spend the intervening year as a Carnegie Bosch Institute Fellow, working with Rachel Kurchin, an assistant research professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at CMU. Previously, they were a postdoctoral fellow in the Gomes Group at CMU, working on projects related to reaction optimization and large language models.

Spotte-Smith received their Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2023 and their bachelor's degree in materials science and engineering from Columbia University in 2019.

Societal issues around sustainability motivate Spotte-Smith's theoretical and computational research. They are interested in developing better electrolytes for batteries, with applications such as grid scale storage and electric vehicles. Their research can also help find new energy-efficient ways to synthesize common materials and molecules, which can be used to decarbonize industry and manage plastic waste. "Everything that I do, even when I'm working on fundamental methods, is to serve one of these applications," says Spotte-Smith.

Spotte-Smith applies computational chemistry and data science to understand molecular reactivity in complex environments. Much of their work involves chemical reaction networks, a type of data structure used to explore possible reactions in a chemical space. Spotte-Smith starts with a target, such as a molecule they want to synthesize or a process they want to prevent. "I try to explore everything that's going on, or could go on, in that space," they say. The methods that Spotte-Smith has developed enable them to automatically identify the most important reactions and species involved in a process and then target those for further analysis or for modification.

The CMU Cloud Lab offers opportunities to use theoretical techniques Spotte-Smith has developed in new ways. "It's going to be fun to be creative with insights we can get from highly standardized high-throughput experiments," they say.

Outside of numbers, methods, and algorithms, Spotte-Smith says they think deeply about how we do science. They will bring a focus on ethics and building community to their research group and teaching.

For media inquiries, please contact Lauren Smith at lsmith2@andrew.cmu.edu.