Gomes wins Scialog Automating Chemical Laboratories awards

Research Corporation for Science Advancement, the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, and the Frederick Gardner Cottrell Foundation have made awards to seven multidisciplinary teams of early career researchers in the first year of Scialog: Automating Chemical Laboratories, a three-year initiative that aims to accelerate innovation and broaden access within the chemical enterprise through advances in automated instrumentation and artificial intelligence. Scialog is short for "science + dialog."

The 18 individual awards of $60,000 in direct costs will go to 17 researchers from a variety of institutions in the United States and Canada. Gabe Gomes, assistant professor of chemical engineering and chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University, is a member of two funded teams and will receive two awards.

For the project "Structure Identification in Complex Chemical Mixtures Using Boltzmann Spectroscopy," Gomes will collaborate with Daniel Schwalbe-Koda from the University of California, Los Angeles, and Jeffrey Lopez from Northwestern University. For the project "A Data-Driven Approach for Derisking Chemical Synthesis," Gomes will collaborate with Laura Ackerman-Biegasiewicz from Emory University.

"We are on the cusp of a revolution in how science gets done," said RCSA Senior Program Director Andrew Feig, who leads the initiative. "These technologies will change every aspect of the chemical experimental workflow, from what molecules are made, to how they are synthesized, purified, and analyzed."

"They could also help democratize science by making discovery open to those with interesting ideas and not just the laboratories with the most expensive, cutting-edge instrumentation," he added.

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