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Fellows Selected for New Scialog: Automating Chemical Laboratories

More than 50 early career researchers have been selected as Fellows for the first meeting of a three-year initiative to accelerate innovation in basic research and broaden access within the chemical enterprise through advances in automated instrumentation and artificial intelligence.

Scialog: Automating Chemical Laboratories, set to begin in April 2024 and continuing through 2026, is co-sponsored by Research Corporation for Science Advancement and the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation. Scialog, created by RCSA in 2010, is short for “science + dialog.”

Click here for the list of Fellows and Facilitators who will be attending the 2024 Scialog: Automating Chemical Laboratories meeting. More names will be added as they are confirmed for 2024’s meeting, and further opportunities for Fellows to join the initiative will become available.

This interdisciplinary community of Fellows represents institutions across the United States and Canada, and brings together expertise from distinct fields of synthetic chemistry (organic, inorganic, materials, and biological), integrated and automated instrument development, engineering, materials science, computer and data science, and AI computer research. In addition to identifying and analyzing bottlenecks to advancing fundamental science, the group will discuss how the chemistry curriculum and workforce development must adapt to the changes in how basic chemistry research is conducted.

Senior scientists will serve as Facilitators to frame the large questions under consideration, and to evaluate proposals for novel, high-risk research that can best be explored in a collaborative, multidisciplinary way. The most promising of those team projects will be awarded seed funding.

Automating Chemical Laboratories will be RCSA’s first Scialog co-sponsorship with the Beckman Foundation.

RCSA’s other upcoming Scialog meetings will include the first year of Sustainable Minerals, Metals, and Materials in September 2024, the third year of Molecular Basis of Cognition in October 2024, and the first year of Early Science with the LSST in November 2024.

To nominate an early career scientist as a Fellow for any of RCSA’s upcoming Scialog initiatives, please contact the program director. To nominate yourself, submit a Scialog Fellow Nomination application here.

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