OPTIMA Seminar Series 1 December 2021
Speaker: Dr Ellie Hajizadeh, University of Melbourne
Materials Informatics: ML-based Optimisation for Accelerated Materials Engineering
The discovery of materials possessing a desired attribute is a holy grail of materials engineering. “Forward design” – searching through parameter space to find favourable combinations that yield materials with some chosen characteristics – is commonly adopted. However, combinatorial space increases exponentially with dimensionality; therefore, such approaches can be hampered by the cost associated with exploration of vast swathes of parameter space as well as potential couplings between tunable parameters.
With recent developments in machine learning (ML) algorithms and optimisation techniques, we now have a powerful arsenal to tackle issues associated with the common ad hoc trial-and-error forward design approaches.
Materials Informatics has emerged as a transformational discipline that integrates ML-based optimisation into the realm of materials design. Materials informatics enables development of novel “inverse design” methodologies, where a desired material property is explicitly targeted, and the parameters necessary to achieve it are found by a way of solving a constrained optimisation problem.
Ellie is a computational soft matter physicist and engineer. The computational materials design tools that she has developed throughout her career are currently being used in chemical companies and government labs in US and Australia.
Following a two-year Fellowship at the University of Michigan, Ellie joined the Australian Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG) in 2017 as a Research Scientist, where she established a research program in the field of Multiscale Simulation of Soft Matter and led a $1.5 million Next Generation Technologies Fund project to develop an Integrated Multiscale Materials Simulation Platform for Advanced Acoustic Materials.
Ellie is the head of “Soft Matter Informatics Research Group” and a Lecturer at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, and Information Technology at the University of Melbourne since 2019 and is the current Secretary of the Australian Society of Rheology.
WED 1 DECEMBER 4PM – 5PM AEST
ZOOM MEETING ID: 873 1557 5255; PASSWORD: 778635