Scientists Meet Scientists – TUM-IAS Wednesday Coffee Talk by TUM-IAS Fellow Prof. Dr. Heather J. Kulik on “The Evolution of Discovery: Mapping Chemistry’s Family Tree”
Events, WCT |
On 15 July 2026, Lammot du Pont Professor of Chemical Enigneering Prof. Dr. Heather J. Kulik (Departments of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry, MIT) will talk about “The Evolution of Discovery: Mapping Chemistry’s Family Tree”
Abstract: Do our materials have ancestors? Over generations of research, inorganic and materials chemists have re-imagined familiar scaffolds into new forms by changing substituents or replacing one element with another, each modification carrying the trace of earlier discoveries. Yet, unlike biological species, chemistry has no family tree to reveal how one idea led to another. In this talk, I will describe our efforts to build that tree and to ask a bold question: if we teach machines (materials) chemistry’s past, can they foresee its future? While such a question could be asked and answered in many areas of materials, we focus on transition-metal complexes. These complexes provide an ideal testing ground for this question because they have been systematically studied and crystallized to obtain precise structures over the past several decades, Additionally, these materials, metals with partially filled d- and f-orbitals interact delicately with organic ligands, producing a vast diversity of electronic structures and reactivities. I will present our efforts, both challenges and successes, in building this map and describe our early efforts to train generative models to predict the "future" of chemistry. Time permitting, I will also talk about our related efforts in learning on literature data and curating large datasets of both transition metal complexes and related metal-organic frameworks.
Date: July 15, 2026
Time: 13:00 CEST (until approx. 14:00)
Location: online
Registration: The TUM-IAS Wednesday Coffee talks are held online via Microsoft Teams. To register and to receive the Teams link, please send an email to events@ias.tum.de.
THE TUM-IAS WEDNESDAY COFFEE TALKS
Every Wednesday after lunch, it's all about a new topic - current research highlights at TUM, insights into the work of our Fellows from all over the world, sometimes even topics not usually found at TUM, such as history or theology.
The talks held online start every Wednesday during TUM lecture time at 13:00 CE(S)T. Everyone is welcome - TUM researchers of all levels, students, visiting scholars, and anyone interested!
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An overview of upcoming and past TUM-IAS Wednesday Coffee Talks can be found at the TUM-IAS Wednesday Coffee Talk Overview.