Chad Mirkin is the Director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology and Rathmann Professor of Chemistry, MSE, BME, CBE, and Medicine at Northwestern University. He invented and has developed spherical nucleic acids and various nanopatterning and materials discovery methodologies. He has authored >865 papers and >1,200 patents (>430 issued) and founded 10 companies. Mirkin has been recognized with >250 awards. He served for eight years on PCAST. He has given >900 invited lectures and educated >320 graduate students and postdocs.

2024 CME NASA Symposium Abstract

Creating new materials with specific properties is essential for societal advancement. With countless combinations and the exponential potential at the nanoscale, my team has developed a scanning probe lithography method to create nanomaterial “megalibraries” which contain ~5 billion unique nanomaterials and represent a significant expansion in the range of synthesized materials. By integrating machine learning to guide nanomaterial synthesis for targeted properties, this approach promises to revolutionize material discovery, potentially enhancing technology and medicine, from clean energy to space explorations.

2022 CME NASA Symposium Abstract

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.