Aaron Gilad Kusne (Fed)

Research Scientist, Materials Measurement Science Division, National Institute of Standards & Technology  
Adjunct Associate Professor of Materials Science & Engineering, University of Maryland College Park

Autonomous Materials Research Systems

Accelerating Discovery & Democratizing Science

Main Projects
Key focus - Machine learning for science: active learning to guide and optimize experiments, incorporating prior scientific knowledge into ML, uncertainty quantification and propagation, trust and interpretability.
Real world successes: discovery of new materials in rare-earth free permanent magnetics, spin-driven thermoelectrics, and phase change materials.
 

Project: Materials Exploration, Discovery, and Optimization
The structure of a material greatly influences its properties. Thus the search for better materials must often include knowledge of the relationship between how a material is made and the resulting structure, i.e. "phase mapping".  
Autonomous phase mapping at the Stanford Linear Accelerator has allowed us to reduce the number of measurement experiments necessary for phase mapping by an order of magnitude. This in turn accelerates materials optimization and discovery, resulting in the first autonomous system to discover a best-in-class material (phase-change memory material) CAMEO: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19597-w

Icons from CAMEO paper available below. Please reference: Kusne, A.G., et al. "On-the-fly closed-loop materials discovery via Bayesian active learning." Nature communications 11.1 (2020): 1-11.
For other versions, please contact me.

Project: Autonomous Metrology
We are investigating the use of ML to guide microscopy and other measurement systems to accelerate knowledge capture.  

Project: Autonomous Protein Engineering
The complexity of biological systems is incredible. We are combining ML and robotics to build a greater understanding of protein engineering.  
https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.02106, https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.05.979385, https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.10.197574

Project: ML for Accelerating Materials Research
We use ML to learn about important materials (e.g. superconductors) and guide research in the lab. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41524-018-0085-8 

Project: Bootcamp: Machine Learning for Materials Research
Educating the next generation of physicists and materials scientists.  
MLMR 2020 180 attendees joined us from 13 countries, 30% from industry.  Over the 5 years of the bootcamp, we have had attendees from  a total of 19 countries. We have also run tutorials at MRS, APS, TMS, MLSE, NSF meetings, among others.

Project: REMI - REsource for Materials Informatics
A repository for tutorials and code examples covering materials data import/export, pre-processing, and analysis. Search by material system, synthesis / simulation method, measurement method, data type, data analysis type, and more.

In the News
ML for Superconductivity: Scientific American: Our ML-driven search for room-temperature superconductors.
CAMEO + Materials Discovery: AAAS Eureka Alert!; Science Daily; Semiconductor Engineering; Phys.org; Optics.org; Science Bulletin; COSMOS Magazine; Chemical Engineering; UMD News; NIST News

Group Members
Austin McDannald
Machine Learning + Materials Science  
NIST Postdoc

Amit Verma
Machine Learning + Materials Science  
CMU Postdoc

Jong Ho Kim
Machine Learning + Materials Science
Research Scientist, Research Institute of Industrial Science & Technology, Korea

Haotong Liang
Machine Learning + Materials Science
UMD PhD Student

Alex Wang
Machine Learning + Materials Science
UMD Undergraduate Student

Logan Saar
Machine Learning + Materials Science
UMD Undergraduate Student

Past Group Members
Peter Tonner
NIST NRC Postdoc, Machine Learning + Genetics
Current: Research Scientist, NIST

Brian DeCost
NRC Postdoc, Machine Learning + Materials Science  
Current: Research Scientist, NIST

Graham Antoszewski
UMD Masters in Applied Math  
Current: BlackSky
 

Past Mentees
Yuma Iwasaki
Research Scientist, NEC  
Current: Research Scientist, NEC

Varshini Salvedurai
Summer High School Student (SHIP)  
Current: CMU CS Undergraduate
 

Open Positions
For openings, please contact me at: aaron(.)kusne(@)nist(.)gov  

NRC Postdoc Postings:

• Machine Learning-driven Autonomous Systems for Materials Discovery and Optimization
• Machine Learning for Autonomous Genetic Engineering of Microbial Systems
• Machine Learning for High Throughput Materials Discovery and Optimization Applications

Publication List

See my google scholar page

 

Recently Organized Workshops

2021 MRS Fall Symposium: Accelerating Experimental Materials Research with Machine Learning
2021 MRS Tutorial Day: Machine Learning for Materials Science and Engineering
2021 Workshop on Autonomous Materials Research
2021 Materials Research Data Alliance Workshop: Education and Workforce Development
2021 LBL Workshop: Workshop on Autonomous Discovery in Science and Engineering
2020 MRS Kavli Workshop: Building a Community for Autonomous Research, Online.
2020 Workshop on Machine Learning Microscopy Data, College Park, MD
2019 Autonomous Systems for Materials Development Workshop, Philadelphia, PA
2019 MLMR Workshop on Autonomous Research, College Park, MD

Bronze Award - The Bronze Medal Award is the highest recognition awarded by NIST.