Our Vision for the Future of Materials Discovery in NAE's The Bridge
NAE Bridge Issue on the Materials Genome Initiative – Fall 2025
Imagine a future where discovering revolutionary new materials for advanced energy, grid-scale batteries, or quantum computers doesn't take decades, but days. What if we could move beyond trial-and-error and instead operate “atomic factories” that design and build novel technologies, one atom at a time?
This isn't science fiction. This is the vision for the future of materials science that I, along with my esteemed colleagues Dr. Sergei V. Kalinin (University of Tennessee, Knoxville/PNNL) and Prof. Vinayak Dravid (Northwestern University), recently outlined in an invited perspective for the National Academy of Engineering's The Bridge magazine.
Our article, “Self-Driving Microscopy for AI/ML-Enabled Physics Discovery and Materials Optimization,” details a roadmap for creating intelligent, autonomous microscopes that can accelerate scientific discovery at an unprecedented pace.
For too long, a critical bottleneck has slowed progress: while we can rapidly synthesize and model new materials, the process of characterizing them—seeing what we've made and understanding its properties—has remained a slow, manual process. Our solution is to integrate artificial intelligence directly into the microscope's operation, transforming it from a passive imaging tool into an active, decision-making “self-driving laboratory.”
We lay out a path forward based on five levels of autonomy, starting with AI-assisted data analysis and culminating in fully autonomous systems (Level 5) that not only analyze materials but also control synthesis hardware to intelligently create the next sample in a closed loop. This paradigm shift will enable us to rapidly screen vast “megalibraries” containing millions of unique material compositions and unlock the ability to perform atomic-scale fabrication with machine precision .
This work is central to my own research focus at NREL and the Colorado School of Mines. It was a true privilege to collaborate with Sergei and Vinayak to articulate this vision for the broader scientific and engineering community. We believe we are on the cusp of a new era, one where autonomous science will be the primary engine for inventing the materials that will define our future.