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Biography

Dr Alex Ganose M黑料社区 is an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry at Imperial College London. He leads a research group focused on developing and deploying computational approaches to solve challenges in materials chemistry, with an emphasis on energy applications. His group combines materials informatics, high-throughput ab initio calculations, and machine learning to accelerate the discovery and optimisation of functional materials, including semiconductors for photovoltaics, thermoelectrics, transparent conductors, and solid-state batteries.
 
Alex completed his EngD in computational chemistry in Professor David Scanlon's group at University College London in 2018, where his thesis was recognised by a Springer Thesis Prize and a Scopus Early Career Award in Physical Sciences. He then joined Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California as a Postdoctoral Scholar, before returning to the UK in 2021 to take up an EPSRC Fellowship in the Department of Materials at Imperial College London. He moved to his current position in the Department of Chemistry in 2022.

Science is often seen as the opposite of creative fields like the arts, but in my experience, the best scientists are some of the most creative people I know.

Alex Ganose

Q&A

Can you tell us more about your work?

My group develops computational tools that help scientists predict how materials will behave before they are ever made in a laboratory. Discovering a new material for a solar panel, battery, or thermoelectric device traditionally takes years of trial and error. By using quantum mechanics and machine learning, my group can simulate the properties of thousands of candidate materials on a computer in a fraction of the time, and identify the most promising ones for experimentalists to make and test.
 
A central focus of the group is making these simulations faster, more accurate, and easier to use. The software we develop is freely available and used by researchers and companies around the world to study materials for clean energy applications, from solar cells and batteries to materials that split water to produce hydrogen fuel. By accelerating the discovery process, this work supports the global transition to sustainable energy technologies.

Thinking back to earlier in your career, are there any words of wisdom that you wish someone had told you? 

Find good mentors, and don鈥檛 be afraid of asking them for advice. I have been incredibly fortunate throughout my career, starting with my PhD supervisor David Scanlon, then with my postdoctoral advisors, and now with my colleagues at Imperial. So much about academia isn't explained when you are a PhD student, from navigating funding to building collaborations and shaping a research vision. Having people who have been through it before to guide you is, frankly, essential.

What do you wish more people understood about your field or the chemical sciences in general? 

Science is often seen as the opposite of creative fields like the arts, but in my experience, the best scientists are some of the most creative people I know. Research is fundamentally about asking new questions, finding unexpected connections, and inventing new ways to solve problems. I wish more people understood that a career in the chemical sciences offers so much creative freedom. It is one of the things that makes it such a rewarding field to work in.

Are there any scientific developments, either recent or on the horizon, that you are excited about? 

It is impossible to ignore the advances of artificial intelligence and machine learning. As a computational chemist, a big challenge is always the gap between what I simulate and what my collaborators actually measure in the laboratory. One of the big promises of these emerging approaches is closing that gap, allowing us to model materials at the size, complexity, and timescales relevant to real devices. I find this incredibly exciting, and I think it will fundamentally change how computation contributes to materials discovery over the next decade.

How important would you say collaboration is for producing high quality science? How has collaboration influenced your work? 

For me, collaboration is what makes research exciting. No single person can be an expert in everything, and the most interesting science often sits at the boundaries between disciplines. I have been fortunate to work with amazing experimental and computational collaborators throughout my career, both in the UK and internationally. Bringing together different perspectives and ways of thinking inevitably brings challenges, but working through them is what leads to the most impactful and rewarding research.