CHEE Seminar: Bradley Olsen
Monday, November 14, 2022 – 3:00 p.m.
Bradley Olsen, PhD
Alexander and I. Michael (1960) Kasser Professor
Department of Chemical Engineering
MIT
"The Community Resource for Innovation in Polymer Technology: An Open Data Ecosystem to Catalyze Innovation in Polymer Science"
Harvill Bldg., Room 305
Social Hour immediately following seminar in Old Engineering 157 (Graduate Student Lounge), at 4:00 p.m.
ABSTRACT
Our widespread adoption of polymers has enabled an era of unprecedented increase in the global standard of living due to clean water, uncontaminated food, and wider provision of health care. Continued innovation at a rapid pace is needed to continue to address society’s most pressing challenges, including supply chain stability, lightweight transportation, curing novel diseases, and solving our sustainability crisis that has been caused in no small part by commodity plastics. However, polymer science has lagged substantially behind other branches of chemistry in applying informatics tools because polymers present several unique challenges for data science: (1) stochastic structures, (2) small and disparate data, (3) challenging nomenclature, and (4) multi-scale chemistry and physics. To address these issues we have developed the Community Resource for Innovation in Polymer Technology (CRIPT), a polymer data ecosystem resulting from collaboration between MIT, Dow, U. Chicago, Citrine Informatics, and NIST. CRIPT provides the community with an infrastructure for sharing FAIR data and is developing tools to promote trustworthy data and increase data availability, providing democratic access across our community to the foundational knowledge needed for the next generation of polymer science. It is based on new technologies including polymer line notations (BigSMILES), new data structures (PolyDAT and CRIPT), and new search (BigSMARTS) and similarity ranking technologies. The CRIPT ecosystem brings these tools together in a user-friendly manner to help researchers maximize the speed at which they can reach tomorrow’s fundamental knowledge and transformational material discoveries.
BIOSKETCH
Bradley Olsen is the Alexander and I. Michael (1960) Kasser Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT. He earned his BS in chemical engineering at MIT, his Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of California – Berkeley, and was a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology. He started as a professor at MIT in December 2009. Olsen’s research expertise is in materials chemistry and polymer physics, with focused activities in the areas of molecular self-assembly, polymer networks, natural and sustainable materials, and polymer informatics.