Curriculum Vitae

Education & Experience

1. 2014 – 2023 · Nanjing

   Materials engineering, then a PhD on fuel cells and electrolyzers: synthesis, electrochemical testing, characterization. I learned how expensive trial-and-error can be.

2. 2020 – 2023 · First ML work

   ML papers on electrocatalysts and membrane assemblies. The hard part was never just the material. It was the whole system.

3. 2023 · Chicago & Argonne

   Schmidt AI in Science Fellowship. I switched from running experiments to building AI that decides which experiments are worth running.

4. 2024 – 2026 · The stack

   DToR for hypotheses, T³ for screening, RAPIDS for validation.

5. 2026 → · Co-scientist

   The Seed Fund project runs the full loop on a real membrane problem.

Current Position

University of Chicago & Argonne National Laboratory

Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Fellow | Resident Associate

Sept. 2023 – Present

Advisors: Prof. Junhong Chen (PME/Argonne) & Prof. Yuxin Chen (CS)

Education

Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering

Nanjing University, China — machine learning, electrocatalysts, membrane-electrode assemblies, fuel cells, water electrolyzers

Sept. 2018 – Jun. 2023

Visiting Graduate Researcher

Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Oct. 2022 – Apr. 2023

B.Eng.

Nanjing University, China

Sept. 2014 – Jun. 2018

Selected Presentations (2024–2026)

ACM SIGKDD 2026 (KDD) — Main Conference

Text-Twin-Translation (T³), AI for Sciences Track

Jeju Island, Republic of Korea — 2026

ICML 2026 AI4Physics Workshop

Poster: Geometry, Not Energy Surface, Drives the Neutral MLIP–DFT Gap (RAPIDS)

Seoul, Republic of Korea — July 2026

ICLR 2026 AI4Mat Workshop

Spotlight Oral: Text-Twin-Translation (T³)

Brazil — 2026

NeurIPS 2025 AI4Mat Workshop

Poster: Deep Research with Local-Web RAG

San Diego, CA — December 2025

NeurIPS 2025 ML4PS Workshop

Poster: Neuromorphic Random Walk for Phosphate Adsorption

San Diego, CA — December 2025

248th ECS Meeting

Chicago, IL — October 2025

Gordon Research Seminar on Nanomaterials for Energy Technology

Ventura, CA — February 2025

ACM ICONS: International Conference on Neuromorphic Systems

Seattle, WA — July 2025

Knowledge-Guided Machine Learning Workshop

University of Michigan — August 2025

Schmidt Sciences Entrepreneurship Retreat

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory — September 2025

Peer Review

Conferences & Workshops — AI / Computer Science

ACM SIGKDD Main Conference (KDD) · NeurIPS AI4Mat · ICLR AI4Mat · ICML AI4Physics

Journals — Chemistry / Materials

ACS Catalysis · Energy & Fuels · Journal of Water Process Engineering · Synthetic Metals · Organic Letters · ACS Applied Energy Materials · Nanomaterials

Teaching

Three principles, learned from running the discovery loop myself: connect theory to device behaviour a student can actually observe; make them implement and break the models rather than watch them run; and treat a defended validation as part of the result, not a formality.

Curriculum — NSF Research Traineeship, UChicago PME

Four open-source AI/ML modules for graduate students, each built on a published research dataset rather than a teaching toy: literature-mined electrocatalyst property prediction, device-stability modelling, LLM knowledge extraction from sensor papers, and a controlled comparison of text- versus image-based extraction. Every notebook runs end to end from shipped cache, with no API key and no cost to the student. Materials

University of Chicago, 2026

Assessment design — AI+Science Hackathon

Built the evaluation harness for the knowledge-graph track: a reference-free composite score, validated against a multi-model LLM-judge rubric, so six teams could be compared on evidence rather than impressions. Harness

University of Chicago, 2026

Prepared to teach

Introduction to materials science · materials characterization · computational materials science · electrochemical energy materials · nanomaterials. New electives developed: Machine Learning for Materials; Autonomous Materials Discovery.

Mentorship & Service

2026 Schmidt AI in Science Faculty Fellowship

Mentoring Omolola Ogbolumani (faculty, University of Lagos, Nigeria) — Human-in-the-Loop AI Design for Food, Energy, and Water Nexus (FEW-N) Optimization

University of Chicago, Jan.–Jun. 2026

2026 AI+Science Hackathon — Technical Lead

Defined the multi-agent / knowledge-graph track: task design, curated dataset, evaluation harness, and judging

University of Chicago, April 2026

AI+Science Schmidt Fellows Speaker Series

Host Representative

University of Chicago, 2024–2026

2025 AI Presidential Challenge

Mentoring junior high school students on AI applications

2025

Research Experience for Nigerian Undergraduates (RENEU)

Mentee: Covenant Amoo — LLM for FET Sensor Knowledge Extraction

University of Chicago, 2025

Research Experience for Nigerian Undergraduates (RENEU), Cohort 2024

Assisted mentoring: Abdulafeez Olaitan — Dynamic Reshaping of Nanodroplets Under Electron Beam Radiation

University of Chicago, 2024

AI+Science Hackathon

Team of 4 undergraduates — AI for materials characterization

University of Chicago, 2025

LLM Hackathon for Materials Science & Chemistry

Project: V-RAPIDS

Argonne National Lab, 2025