Christy Landes (UIUC): Schmidt AI in Science Speaker Series
Organized by the University of Chicago’s Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Fellowship Program.
Agenda
4:00pm – 4:45pm: Presentation
4:45pm – 5:00pm: Q&A
5:00pm – 5:30pm: Reception
Meeting location
William Eckhardt Research Center. Room 401
5640 S Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637
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Title: AI-Enabled Spectroscopic Imaging for Energy and Precision Health
Abstract: We are awash in information at an unprecedented level of detail about unprecedentedly complex chemical materials, but we largely still collect, store, analyze, and present this data according to 20th-century norms. Existing experimental and computational tools are insufficient to understand and control the immense wealth of chemical information about dynamic chemical heterogeneity in complex materials. We require transformative new data-informed and multimodal methods to predictably direct the structure-dynamics-function relationships in such materials. Our physical chemistry community can work together to generate greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts discoveries across a broad swath of chemistry with new tools for multimodal imaging, smart acquisition, data-driven exploration, and physical modeling.
Synthetic organic chemists, chemical biologists, and materials scientists are better than ever at making molecules with precise bond structures. But when reactivity is governed by weak forces, chemical design rules break down. This breakdown leads directly to outcomes such as our global chemical and biomolecular separations communities relying on wasteful 100-year-old empirical methods. Collective dynamics from such systems cannot be explained by a single chemical species or the determination of something as concrete as a molecular orbital energy, yet their mass, charge, and energy transfer properties can yield unique electrical, optical, mechanical, and magnetic behavior arising because of, rather than despite, their chemical heterogeneity.
I will discuss recent efforts by our group and others that show promise for using physics-informed AI to make new discoveries that span energy and human health applications.
Bio: Christy Landes earned a B.S. in chemistry from George Mason University in 1998, and her Ph.D. was awarded from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2003 under the direction of Mostafa El-Sayed. After postdoctoral positions at the University of Oregon and the University of Texas at Austin, she began her independent career at the University of Houston in 2006. In 2009 she moved to Rice University, where she rose through the ranks to become the Kenneth S. Pitzer-Schlumberger Chair of Chemistry. In 2023, she joined the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
