Friday 13 November 2026 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Cambridge Graphene Centre Seminar Room, Electrical Engineering Division, 9 JJ Thomson Avenue.
This talk will explore how digital labs combine automation, data infrastructures and AI-driven methods to accelerate materials discovery, including automated synthesis, robotic workflows and Bayesian optimisation.
About
Through automating routine lab tasks, developing image processing techniques, creating technologies for contextualising laboratory operations and establishing laboratory data infrastructures, we are creating “digital labs.” Such labs enable a faster pace of materials discovery and development. In this talk Prof. Lapkin will present the overall architecture of a digital lab that is being gradually built at the Innovation Centre for Digital Molecular Technologies. He’ll then exemplify their workflows on several examples: using Bayesian optimisation with fully automated experiments that can include labs in different parts of the world to fine-tune recipes for materials manufacture, creating robotic pipelines for making formulations, using image processing and robots to generated data for investigating polymer-solvent interactions.
Attend this talk to explore:
- Data stacks for digital labs; FAIR data, ontologies and RO-Crates.
- Bayesian optimisation of materials synthesis.
- Building low-cost robots to speed-up data generation.
About the speaker
Prof. Alexei Lapkin, University of Cambridge
Alexei Lapkin studied biochemistry at Novosibirsk State University. After three-and-a-half years of working as a research scientist studying polymeric membranes, he moved to UK to work in the area of catalytic membrane reactors. For this work, under the supervision of Prof. John W Thomas, he obtained his PhD at the University of Bath in 2000, and was appointed a lecturer in chemical engineering at Bath the same year. In 2009 he was appointed a Professor of Engineering at the University of Warwick and in 2013 was elected to his current role of Professor of Sustainable Reaction Engineering (SRE) at the University of Cambridge. In 2025-2026 he was an International Francqui Chair at KU Leuven. Currently, he is an IMM Visiting Chair at National University of Singapore. He is a co-director of Cambridge Centre for Research and Education in Singapore (CARES). The SRE group at Cambridge is working mainly on aspects of sustainability in the manufacture of molecules and materials. Today, this includes development of infrastructure for AI-assisted research.