Recipes for Sustainable Materials

Elsa Olivetti PhD ’07 (Atlantic Richfield Assistant Professor of Energy Studies in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering) and Stefanie Jegelka (X-Consortium Career Development Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) are joining forces to create a neural network that can pore through scientific papers and, through pattern recognition, extract “recipes” for producing particular types of materials. In a recent paper, Olivetti, Jegelka, and colleagues used this mechanism to suggest alternative recipes for known materials. Their work could also help to identify practical ways to create new materials with desirable properties.

 
Photo of Jegelka, left, and Olivetti by Stuart Darsch, courtesy of the MIT Energy Initiative.