Bio: Dr. Chad A. Mirkin is the Director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology and the George B. Rathmann Prof. of Chemistry, Prof. of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Prof. of Biomedical Engineering, Prof. of Materials Science & Engineering, and Prof. of Medicine at Northwestern University. Mirkin holds a B.S. degree from Dickinson College (1986, elected into Phi Beta Kappa) and a Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from Penn. State Univ. (1989). He was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT prior to becoming a professor at Northwestern Univ. in 1991.

2022-08 Abstract Title: Exploring the “Matterverse” with Nanomaterial Megalibraries

Abstract Body: The materials we have relied on have evolved over time. Due to the massive parameter space, approaches are needed to rapidly synthesize and screen materials for desired properties. We have developed a scanning probe lithography approach to prepare “megalibraries” of ~5 billion positionally encoded nanomaterials with distinct chemistries. We are developing high-throughput characterization techniques that match the extraordinary pace of synthesis, creating an inflection point in the pace at which we explore the “matterverse”. These approaches produce unprecedentedly large and high-quality data sets that can uniquely inform and educate ML/AI algorithms used to predict novel materials structure/function correlations.