Rui Ding
Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Chicago & Argonne National Laboratory
I develop AI systems that autonomously conduct scientific research in materials and chemistry. My work focuses on building agents that can read literature, design experiments, and discover new materials with minimal human intervention.
Autonomous Discovery Agents
LLM-based agents that orchestrate end-to-end research workflows—from literature review to hypothesis generation to experimental validation.
Cross-Modal Scientific AI
Integrating text, molecular and device structures, images, and experimental data for unified materials understanding.
Local-First AI Infrastructure
Deploying open-source models on institutional hardware for secure, reproducible scientific computing.
Current project: BRAINIAC—a framework for AI-driven nano/micro materials discovery. Recent work includes DToR, a deep-research agent that outperforms commercial systems on materials topics (arXiv), and T3 (Text-Twin-Translation), an agentic + topology-aware GNN framework for data-scarce materials/device design, accepted at SIGKDD 2026 AI4Science (OpenReview, code).
Advised by Prof. Junhong Chen (PME/Argonne) and Prof. Yuxin Chen (CS).