Automation and Active Learning for the Autonomous Design of Polymer Biomaterials*

The seamless integration of synthetic materials with biological systems long remains a grand challenge, often curtailed by the sheer complexity of the cell-material interface. For decades, biomaterial scientists and engineers have designed around this complexity by rationally designing new materials one experiment at a time. However, recent advances in laboratory automation, high throughput analytics, and artificial intelligence / machine learning (AI/ML) now provide a unique opportunity to fully automate the design process. In this seminar, we put forth our efforts to develop a biomaterials acceleration platform (BioMAP) (i.e., self-driving biomaterials lab) that can rapidly iterate through design spaces and identify unique material properties that perfectly synergize with biological complexity.