The Henry Royce Institute (Royce) is delighted to announce the appointment of Professor Jacqueline Cole as Royce Challenge Lead for AI in Materials Discovery, Characterisation and Application.
Professor Jacqueline Cole is Head of Molecular Engineering at the University of Cambridge, a Royce Partner Institute, where she leads an interdisciplinary research team at the Cavendish Laboratory.
Commenting on her appointment, Jacqueline said:
“A key priority emerging from the Royce-facilitated National Materials Innovation Strategy is the urgent need to adopt digital tools to accelerate materials innovation – significantly reducing the time to commercialisation. In this role, I will be driving this transition, leveraging AI and data to advance ‘Materials 4.0.’ I look forward to collaborating with the broader materials community to develop the capabilities needed to support this transformation.”
Royce CEO, Professor David Knowles added:
“We recently launched the first-ever national strategy for materials innovation, highlighting two key cross-cutting areas that require a unified approach spanning the entire materials sector: the digital revolution (Materials 4.0) and sustainability. I’m therefore delighted that Jacqui has stepped into this pivotal role which aligns with that first priority area (and links to the second). Bringing her expertise to drive the sector’s digital ambitions and advance collective solutions at the early stage is critical. Her leadership will be instrumental in propelling the UK materials sector forward.”
About Jacqueline Cole
As well as being Head of Molecular Engineering at Cambridge, Jacqueline Cole is the Cambridge lead for two of the EPSRC-funded UK AI Hubs, AIchemy and APRIL, where she is accelerating data-driven materials discovery using AI for chemistry and electronics, respectively.
She combines artificial intelligence with data science, machine-learning algorithms, computational methods and experimental research to afford a ‘design-to-device’ pipeline for data-driven materials discovery.
She is particularly well known for provisioning the global research community with open-access materials databases of experimental information, machine-learning code and models for property prediction and language models that are tailored for the materials domain.
Her research is highly interdisciplinary. Accordingly, she holds two PhDs: one in Physics from the University of Cambridge and one in Chemistry from the University of Durham.
Before moving to Cambridge, she held a post-doctoral position in Physics at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. Prior to this, she undertook a PhD in Chemistry through an international studentship between the Institute Laue Langevin, Grenoble, France, and Durham University. Her university studies began at Durham University where she graduated with first class honours in Chemistry in 1994.
She has also obtained a BSc Hons degree in Mathematics (2000-4), a diploma in Statistics (2004-5), a Certificate in Astronomy and Planetary Science (2006-7), a Diploma in Physics (2007-8) and a BEng Hons degree in Engineering (2010-14) all through the Open University.
