Faculty Recruiting Seminar - Yan Zeng

The Department of Chemistry presents: Yan Zeng 

Florida State University

Title: Autonomous laboratory for solid-state materials synthesis and discovery 

Location: WEL 2.122

Refreshments served at 3:15pm

Many technological advancements, including the development of novel materials for energy and sustainability, rely on the creation of new solid-state materials. Identifying promising material design strategies is only the first step; translating these ideas into synthesized materials whose properties can be validated is often the more difficult and time‑consuming challenge. In this seminar, I will first discuss materials design, with a particular focus on leveraging the concepts of high‑entropy materials to develop fast ionic conductors [1]. Combined theoretical and experimental studies show that mixing multiple metal cations in high‑entropy frameworks induces local disorder and perturbs the site energies of charge‑carrying ions, thereby creating percolating networks that enable fast ion transport. 

Building on the excitement of generating many promising candidates through strategies such as the high‑entropy approach, I will then address the challenge of synthesizing these materials in the laboratory. The second part of the seminar will present the development of an autonomous laboratory designed to accelerate materials synthesis by streamlining the design–make–measure loop [2]. This platform employs AI agents trained on large volume of historical literature to propose initial synthesis recipes, executes experiments using robots and automated instruments, interprets characterization data with machine learning models, and selects subsequent experiments via active learning algorithms. For synthesis targets that are highly sensitive to conditions, such as metastable compounds, the integration of AI with mechanistic understanding of synthesis pathways becomes especially powerful [3]. These approaches aim to transform synthesis from a slow, trial-and-error effort into a streamlined, guided process capable of reliably accessing materials by design.

Key references:

[1] Zeng et al. High-entropy mechanism to boost ionic conductivity. Science 378,1320-1324 (2022).

[2] Szymanski, Zeng*, Ceder*, et al. An autonomous laboratory for the accelerated synthesis of novel materials. Nature 624, 86–91 (2023). 

[3] Zeng et al. Selective formation of metastable polymorphs in solid-state synthesis. Science Advances 10, eadj5431 (2024).