Multidisciplinary collaboration drives materials innovation at the University of Liverpool
The University of Liverpool’s Materials Discovery Frontier, AI Hub and Materials Innovation Factory bring together experts from academia and industry to solve problems
The University of Liverpool brings together disciplines and stakeholders to accelerate materials innovation, said the guests of an episode of the THE Connect podcast.
“It’s about bringing people together,” said Karl Coleman, dean of physical sciences at the university. Its innovation programmes and laboratories, such as the Materials Innovation Factory and the Digital Innovation Facility, combine various disciplines and stakeholders to tackle global challenges and problems.
The Materials Discovery Frontier, for example, is “like a shop window, allowing others to access the experts that sit within that field”, Coleman said.
Alessandro Troisi, a professor of chemistry at the university, said its goal is to harness digital material design using a range of tools that include robotics, automation and data-centric and computational models to generate carbon-neutral materials solutions. “Materials”, Troisi said, include “everything from sensor batteries, energy generation and a novel way of obtaining chemicals from novel sources, not just the petrochemical industry, down to engineering polymers”.
“It’s about bringing people together”
In the past, materials scientists relied on trial and error to make discoveries, which was time-consuming. “Through digital methods, we can accelerate the discovery of new materials,” Troisi said.
Gabriella Pizzuto, a Royal Academy of Engineering research fellow and lecturer in robotics and chemistry automation at the University of Liverpool, is excited about the university’s pioneering work to deploy robots in chemistry laboratories. “We want robots to work in the same space as humans,” she explained. “Our goal is not to replace human chemists, but rather have them augment the capabilities of our scientists.”
Such efforts unite multidisciplinary teams, including roboticists and computational and experimental chemists. “I think this is something particularly unique about our university,” she said.
The university’s Materials Innovation Factory, co-founded by the University of Liverpool and multinational corporation Unilever, is a space that allows industry users to access cutting-edge robotics and automation equipment. “They can come in and develop small pilot projects to see how they can benefit from digitisation in their own sector, and use the facilities to collaborate with academics and top technicians,” Troisi said. “We’re trying to combine top-of-the-range academic output with the greatest possible impact to our local and regional economy.”
“Our goal is not to replace human chemists, but rather have them augment the capabilities of our scientists”
Similarly, the AI for Chemistry hub, which is led by the University of Liverpool and Imperial College London, is also built on the idea of bringing people together, said Pizzuto. The hub is attracting industry players to collaborate with academics and investigate ways that AI can support or grow their businesses.
The university is also helping to develop the next generation of scientists. Its Centre for Doctoral Training in Digital and Automated Materials Chemistry, based within the Materials Innovation Factory, aims to train more than 80 PhD candidates in the interface between physical and computer sciences in the next eight years. “We have this vision where a cohort of students with mixed backgrounds can work together and develop a common language,” said Troisi.
Meanwhile, the university has also launched a master’s programme in digital chemistry, which focuses on robotics, automation and AI, said Pizzuto. “The goal is to make it accessible for chemists who want to upskill in these fields,” she said. However, these new fields are developing very quickly and “it is not about just learning the latest methods”, she said. “It’s about how to apply such methods or related methods to a problem.”
“We have this vision where a cohort of students with mixed backgrounds can work together and develop a common language”
The ultimate ambition, said Coleman, is to break down even more disciplinary barriers and pool expertise to address global challenges. “We want to get to a position where it’s not open to just chemists, we can open it up to computer scientists, material scientists, engineers, mathematicians, physicists, who have a slightly different skill set,” he said. “Bringing together different skill sets and then working together on problems, it is the kind of scenario that we’re facing in industry: lots of different people from different teams or backgrounds coming together to look at challenges or problems.”
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