Audrey Laventure and Delphine Bouilly are added to the fourothers holdersof a Courtois chair, the aim of which is to stimulate research relating to the scientific project of the Courtois Institute of the University of Montreal. Founded in 2021, the Institute aims to exploit advances in artificial intelligence (AI) in the development of new materials. The chairs, lasting seven years, each have a budget of $100,000 per year.
Working at the crossroads of several disciplines
Audrey Laventure has been a professor in the Department of Chemistry at UdeM since 2020. Her expertise lies at the junction of physical chemistry and the chemistry of polymer materials. She was part of the ideation team around the creation of the future Courtois Institute. If the Canada Research Chair in functional polymer materials that she obtained allowed her to deepen her research in chemistry, her work at the Courtois chair will stimulate interdisciplinary collaborations. “I was starting to integrate artificial intelligence, but there was the potential to use it more and thus work at the crossroads of chemistry, physics, mathematics and computer science, which this Courtois chair makes possible,” she says.
The funding over seven years will make it possible to design long-term projects and train students in interdisciplinarity. “It will give us the freedom to take risks,” adds the researcher.
Audrey Laventure will therefore continue her research which aims to accelerate the discovery of functional polymer materials, in particular through the autonomous optimization of 3D printing parameters. “Instead of going through trial and error to understand how a material works, I would like to use AI to find how to print them to obtain the desired properties,” she explains. AI will also facilitate reverse design, i.e. the selection of materials according to the desired properties (electrical conduction, ionic conduction, etc.).
“I am very grateful for the support received, which can be used to create a collaborative space where colleagues and students will come together,” she concludes.
Pursue cutting-edge research
Involved in the creation and establishment of the Courtois Institute, Delphine Bouilly is also its deputy director. Thanks to obtaining a Courtois chair, the professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Montreal will continue her study of interfaces between molecules and nanomaterials.
In recent years, Delphine Bouilly has set up an interdisciplinary research program to create miniaturized sensors based on nanomaterials. “Our work has raised several questions where automation, scaling and artificial intelligence are critical. With this chair, we will be able to accelerate the development of these capacities,” she believes.
Obtaining a Courtois chair will allow Delphine Bouilly to continue her work on the assembly of molecules with nanomaterials such as carbon nanotubes or graphene, work which calls as much on the physics of nanomaterials, biophysics and surface chemistry as on device engineering. “My goal is to develop new tools to understand and exploit the immense complexity of assemblies between molecules and nanomaterials,” she says. There are so many possible configurations that it is impossible to test everything manually, hence the need for new automation and AI approaches to effectively explore this complexity.”
The integration of artificial intelligence will promote the exploration of these multidimensional materials, which could lead to the design of sensors for the biomedical field, agriculture or defense. “This chair will be a catalyst for accelerating the integration of robotization, automation and AI in physics and experimental chemistry. I would like to develop a collaborative and open approach, where the tools and know-how that we produce can be adopted by other laboratories at the Courtois Institute,” she says.