Welcoming Diego Espinosa to the TIME Group

I’m pleased to welcome Diego Espinosa as the newest researcher in the Transformative Intelligence for Materials Exploration (TIME) Research Group at Mines. Diego joins us as a Mines FIRST scholar, a competitive fellowship that connects high-potential first-year students with hands-on research opportunities immediately upon arriving on campus.

Diego’s work will target a critical, rapidly evolving frontier in our field: the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) specifically for materials science.

While there is significant hype around generative AI, our group is focused on the practical engineering required to make these tools useful for rigorous scientific discovery. Diego will be exploring how we can adapt LLM architectures to better understand the ontology of materials—helping us translate vast amounts of unstructured literature and data into actionable insights for autonomous experimentation.

It is exciting to see the team grow with such motivated talent. Welcome aboard, Diego.

Photo courtesy Diego Espinosa