Research Associate in AI for Chemistry

Location: White City Campus

Job Summary

The EPSRC has funded AIChemy, a research hub to develop artificial intelligence (AI) for chemistry. AIChemy seeks to both develop new AI approaches and to uptake AI into the chemistry community. The Hub brings together AI researchers from many subdisciplines and both experimental and computational chemists. The hub will promote connectivity of the broader community, training, networking, as well as state-of-the-art research.

This is an exciting opportunity to develop and implement automated experimental workflows in collaboration with a wide range of academic and industrial partners who will be part of AlChemy – a new Hub involving Imperial College London, the University of Liverpool, and a large consortium of academic and industrial partners.

You will focus on exploiting automated high-throughput screening and characterisation to curate and provide the crucial experimental data required for chemical discovery through generative AI to identify novel molecule and materials classes, and for the development of new multi-fidelity machine learning approaches for active learning, Bayesian optimisation, and design of experiments to uncover reaction mechanisms. This is an exciting opportunity to work within the larger team at Imperial, and across the AIChemy hub to collectively deliver novel AI for Chemistry.

You will work on projects coordinated between both experimental chemistry and machine learning academics. These posts offer the academic freedom and the deep science base of Imperial College London and University of Liverpool (including self-driving labs and high-throughput synthesis and analysis setups) to make a notable contribution to the field.

Duties and responsibilities

You will:

• Develop a generalisable automated high-throughput approach for experimental screening and bulk data curation
• Work closely with computational collaborators to ensure appropriate an quantity and quality of experimental data can be provided in a timely manner
• Work closely with computational collaborators to ensure target materials are potentially synthesisable, and then synthesise and characterise promising predicted materials

Essential requirements

• Hold, or be near completion of, a PhD in Chemistry or a closely related discipline, or equivalent research, industrial or commercial experience
• Awareness of previous research on automated approaches in chemistry
• Knowledge and practical experience in synthesis, purification and characterisation techniques
• Experience of dealing with multidisciplinary experimental and computational collaborators
• Practical experience within a research environment and publications in relevant and refereed journals.

Further Information

This is a full time, fixed term position for one year. You will be based at White City Campus with some time spent at the South Kensington Campus, as required for the delivery of the research.

Candidates who have not yet been officially awarded their PhD will be appointed as Research Assistant.

Due to funding constraints for this role, we can offer the salary range only at £45,593 - £49,305 per annum. However, you will be eligible for incremental raises as per our standard pay scale for this grade.

For informal queries, please contact Dr Becky Greenaway, [email protected]