Seven Teams Win Scialog Awards for Automating Chemical Laboratories 

Research Corporation for Science Advancement, the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, and the Frederick Gardner Cottrell Foundation have funded seven team proposals for collaborative projects pairing advances in automation and AI to key questions in fundamental research in the second year of the Scialog: Automating Chemical Laboratories initiative. 

The 18 individual awards of $60,000 in direct costs will go to 16 researchers from a variety of institutions in the United States and Canada. 

RCSA Senior Program Director Andrew Feig, who leads the initiative, reminded participants that foundations are willing to take risks that federal agencies typically won’t and that Scialog is specifically designed to support innovative, boundary-pushing research that might fail but could also lead to transformative outcomes. 

“If 100% of the proposals work exactly as described, we were not risky enough,” he said. “We want to reach far enough to transform the world.”  

Scialog is short for “science + dialog.” Created in 2010 by RCSA, Scialog’s unique format aims to accelerate breakthroughs by building a creative network of scientists that crosses disciplinary silos, and by stimulating intensive conversation around an important scientific theme. Early career participants are selected from multiple disciplines, approaches and methodologies, and are encouraged to form teams to propose high-risk, high-reward projects based on innovative ideas that emerge during the conference. 

The second of three annual meetings held April 11-14, 2025, in Tucson, Arizona, engaged 45 Fellows in a series of conversations designed to build a community eager to share their expertise, discuss challenges and gaps in current knowledge, and devise blue-sky collaborative projects. Groupings for small- and medium-sized discussions were carefully curated using an algorithm that makes participants with less in common more likely to spend time in dialogue with each other. 

Keynote speaker Nikki Pohl, Indiana University, Bloomington, shared lessons she has learned from 20 years of work as a synthetic organic chemist trying to build more automation into her lab. She discussed the benefits and constraints of using commercially available platforms, including her observation that people are slow to adopt the new technologies. 

“The dirty little secret of automation is that humans have to want to set up the machine,” she said. “We’re not to the point where the robots are doing it all on their own.” 

Pohl emphasized the importance of moving away from large, proprietary systems that perform a limited number of tasks to modular, open-source automation solutions that do a variety of things. 

Instead of investing in expensive automation equipment that forces scientists to have to consider, “what can this fantastic machine do and how am I going to adapt some chemistry so I can do it?” she said automation should be designed to incorporate the way a chemist usually thinks, which is to look at the problem first and then design the technology to solve it. 

“It’s the people that are actually the most important part,” she said. “And that’s the part that we sometimes as scientists forget when we’re designing the automation.” 

“Looking at the evolution of automation in our labs, we started with expensive, bespoke solutions that are commercially available with proprietary software, and now we’re starting to even replace moderately expensive parts with cheap, modular parts strung together with open-source software,” she said. “I realized that the students did not adopt automation because, in part, it inhibited their ability to play.” 

Pohl also stressed the need for a cultural shift in the scientific community to prioritize reproducibility and collaboration in designing automated solutions, which could spark the development and more widespread adoption of increasingly accessible and cost-effective technologies. 

Along with Pohl, an expert group of scientists served as Facilitators to guide discussions during the conference. They included: Rajeev Surendran Assary, Argonne National Laboratory; Lane Baker, Texas A&M University; Malika Jeffries-EL, Boston University; Anne LaPointe, Cornell University; Philip LeDuc, Carnegie Mellon University; Karl Mueller, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; Nancy Washton, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; and Christopher Welch, Indiana Consortium for Analytical Sciences and Engineering. 

During mini breakout sessions, participants were challenged to get to know each other and their science and were tasked with envisioning what it would look like to collaborate, how they could leverage their different approaches and methods, and what novel problems they could tackle together. 

Over the weekend, teams coalesced around different projects, and on Sunday morning 21 teams made brief proposal pitches. 

The meeting also included presentations by last year’s awardees on the progress and challenges with their projects. 

Gabe Gomes, Carnegie Mellon University, is a member of two teams funded in the first year of the initiative. He said the projects, which would not have happened without meeting his collaborators at Scialog, have sparked new research in his group to work on an AI+ automation approach to spectroscopy predictions, and that they are now collaborating with a company to commercialize methods and models to derisk and accelerate reaction discovery. 

RCSA President & CEO Daniel Linzer, who is retiring July 1, shared several insights about his experience with Scialog across multiple meetings. 

“It was early in Scialog history when I started at RCSA in 2017, and I was skeptical,” he said. “You’re going to throw people together for two days and expect them to write proposals together and think of exciting new scientific directions that they actually want to commit effort to?” 

He said the number and the quality of the proposals at the end of his first Scialog convinced him, and it has been gratifying to see the program grow in size and impact. “It did work, and it continues to work  ̶  over and over and over again.” 

During his time at RCSA, Linzer has helped Scialog expand through partnerships with approximately 30 different foundations, federal funding agencies, and individual philanthropists. These partnerships broadened the reach of Scialog, allowing RCSA to identify Fellows and Facilitators from throughout the U.S. and Canada who might not otherwise participate in such collaborative scientific conversations. 

He also highlighted the enduring value of the community that forms during Scialog, noting that after three years on a theme, participants develop relationships that become self-sustaining. These connections allow scientists to reach out to each other years later for collaboration on proposals and other opportunities. 

The following AUT teams will receive 2025 Scialog Collaborative Innovation Awards: 

The third and final meeting of Scialog: Automatic Chemical Laboratories is scheduled for April 16-19, 2026, in Tucson, Arizona.