BIDMaP is happy to be jointly hosting this year's seminar series with colleagues in computational physical sciences, including collaborators from the departments of Physics and Astronomy, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Upcoming Seminars

22
Jan
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Featuring Jessica Howard

Stay tuned for more information about this seminar. Speaker Bio: I am a postdoctoral scholar studying theoretical physics at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara. My research is in particle physics, which aims to build a mathematical understanding of the forces...
29
Jan
Heather J. Kulik

"How to use data in inorganic chemistry to make computational predictions a reality"

How to use data in inorganic chemistry to make computational predictions a reality Machine learning in transition metal chemistry has historically lagged behind other areas of...
05
Feb
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Featuring Phiala Shanahan

Stay tuned for more information about this seminar. Speaker Bio: Phiala Shanahan grew up in Adelaide, Australia, and obtained her BSc from the University of Adelaide in 2012 and her PhD, also from the University of Adelaide, in 2015. Before joining the MIT physics faculty...
12
Feb
Wen Jie Ong

Accelerating Chemistry and Materials Innovation with NVIDIA ALCHEMI

Accelerating Chemistry and Materials Innovation with NVIDIA ALCHEMI There will be tremendous advances in ‘AI for Chemistry and Materials Science’ in the coming years. However, many AI models and simulations are currently...
26
Feb
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Featuring Veronique Van Speybroeck

Stay tuned for more information about this seminar. Speaker Bio: Veronique Van Speybroeck is full professor at the Ghent University within the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, since October 2012. She also holds a position as Research Professor at the Ghent University since October 2007...
12
Mar
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Featuring John Kitchin

Stay tuned for more information about this seminar. Speaker Bio: John Kitchin completed his B.S. in Chemistry at North Carolina State University. He completed a M.S. in Materials Science and a PhD in Chemical Engineering at the University of Delaware in 2004 under the advisement...
26
Mar
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Featuring Rocio Semino

Stay tuned for more information about this seminar. Speaker Bio: Rocio Semino is a researcher at the Institut Charles Gerhardt Montpellier. Last December, she was awarded a 1.35 million European Research Council (ERC) grant for her work on metallo-organic networks. Portrait of a chemist who...
02
Apr
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Featuring Blakesley Burkhart

Stay tuned for more information about this seminar. Speaker Bio: Blakesley Burkhart is an associate professor with tenure at Rutgers in the Physics and Astronomy Department. She is also an associate research scientist at the Center for Computational Astrophysics in the Simons Foundation Flatiron Institute...

Past Seminars

20
Nov
anubhav

Anubhav Jain: AI to “solve” the materials design problem: what’s possible, what remains out of reach?

Anubhav Jain explores how high-throughput computation, automated experimentation, literature mining, and AI are reshaping the materials design process. His talk examines...
13
Nov
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Berend Smit: AI-Driven Design of MOFs for Carbon Capture

Berend Smit, a professor at EPFL and Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, is known for his pioneering work in molecular simulation techniques for energy applications. His career spans roles at Shell, the University of Amsterdam...
06
Nov
Wahid

Wahid Bhimji: Transformative AI for Science on Supercomputers

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are transforming scientific discovery. Wahid Bhimji, who leads NERSC’s Data and AI Services Group, will discuss applying deep learning and generative models at scale to...
30
Oct
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Michele Ceriotti: Physically (un)inspired modeling: how much physics do we need to machine learn the quantum properties of materials?

Machine-learning techniques are often applied to perform "end-to-end" predictions making black-box estimates...
23
Oct
Shivam Pandey

Shivam Pandey: Building Accelerated Forward Models for the Large-Scale Structure of the Universe

Shivam Pandey develops machine learning models that transform simple dark matter simulations into detailed galaxy maps with far greater speed and scale. His work enables...
16
Oct
fariman

Amir Barati Farimani: Learning the Language of Atoms: Generative Pretraining Transformers (GPT) for Materials and Molecules

Amir Barati Farimani adapts pretraining methods from language and biology to materials science, using...
09
Oct
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Josh Speagle: A Conceptual Introduction to Deep Learning

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML), especially deep learning, are becoming increasingly popular across scientific fields, with many believing they will have transformational impacts. But important questions remain...
02
Oct
Rafael Gomez-Bombarelli CROP

Rafael Gomez-Bombarelli: The bittersweet lesson of scaling in AI for materials

Artificial intelligence has the potential to bring much-needed acceleration to the development of chemicals and materials for energy and sustainability, just as it has delivered intelligence gains in other fields...
25
Sep
Ilkay

Ilkay Altinas: Societal Computing and Innovation in the AI Era

How societal computing links data, infrastructure, and stakeholders to drive innovation and real-world impact in the AI era. Her talk highlights AI-enabled scientific workflows and digital twins from the WIFIRE Program for...
18
Sep
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Pedro Ballester: Machine-learning scoring functions for structure-based drug discovery: A 15-year perspective

Molecular docking predicts whether and how small molecules bind to a macromolecular target from its 3D atomic-resolution structure...
11
Sep
Adhikari

Rana Adhikari: Machines Learning to Make Better Experiments

Today’s most sensitive physics experiments require optimization of experimental design, nonlinear feedback controls, and materials design, among other challenges. In this talk, Professor Rana Adhikari will describe recent work...
04
Sep
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Unlocking unprecedented domains in computational chemistry with massive open AI models and datasets

Join us to learn more about OMol25, a collection of more than 100 million 3D molecular snapshots whose properties have been calculated with density functional theory, and UMA, models trained on half a billion...
15
May
Yao

May. 15, 2025 - Ching-Yao Lai: Machine-Precision Neural Networks for Multiscale Dynamics

Deep learning techniques are increasingly applied to scientific problems where the precision of networks is crucial. Despite being deemed as universal function approximators, neural networks, in practice, struggle to reduce prediction errors below a certain threshold even with large network sizes and extended training iterations...
08
May
zach

May. 8, 2025 - Zachary W. Ulissi: Open AI/ML Models and Massive Datasets to Accelerate Inorganic Materials Discovery

Understanding how inorganic materials and minerals behave, evolve, and change in various environmental conditions is a core challenge in geophysical sciences, and an area where ab-initio simulation methods have long been helpful. The same processes can also be used to find and discover materials for...
01
May
Roman Garnett

May. 1, 2025 - Roman Garnett: Active search for accelerating scientific discovery

We consider the following pervasive scenario in contemporary scientific discovery: we are faced with an enormous space of candidate designs for some task we must explore. However, our ability to explore this space is severely limited due to the significant inherent costs of experimentation and/or...