Dr. Yinan Wang was recently selected as a Scialog Fellow for Automating Chemical Laboratories, a new three-year initiation co-sponsored by Research Corporation for Science Advancement and the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation. He will attend the first Scialog meeting in April 2024. The scope of Scialog in Automating Chemical Laboratories is to promote advances in automated instrumentation and artificial intelligence (AI) in chemical and biological laboratories. It could have profound impacts by broadening access within the chemical enterprise, optimizing results, improving safety and reproducibility of experiments, enabling people from across the world to conduct experiments they could not do in their own institutions, and increasing the time scientists dedicate to analyzing and understanding research outputs while reducing time spent on rote tasks.
This Scialog series will bring together about 50 early career scientists from distinct fields, including all areas of synthetic chemistry (organic, inorganic, materials, and biological), integrated and automated instrument development, engineering, materials science, computer and data science, and AI computer research. The goal is to create a dynamic, interdisciplinary community that will accelerate progress in the chemical sciences and laboratory automation through collaborative projects marrying advances in automation and AI to key questions in fundamental research. The group is also expected to have additional discussions on how the chemistry curriculum and workforce development must adapt to the changes in how basic chemistry research is conducted.