Toyota Research Institute’s Multimillion-Dollar Materials Science Challenge Moves to the Next Stage

By Brian Storey, Vice President at TRI

In April 2024, TRI announced the Synthesis Advanced Research Challenge (SARC), a multiyear, multimillion-dollar challenge to close the gap between AI-predicted materials and the real-world recipes needed to synthesize them. The challenge funded four of the most promising research proposals from academic scientists working at the intersection of AI, simulation, and materials synthesis.

TRI has now selected a project by Dr. Daniel Schwalbe-Koda, Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at UCLA and PI of the Digital Synthesis Lab, to advance to the next phase of experimental validation. His winning submission, “GLASS” (Generative Learning of Amorphous Structures from Spectra), is a generative framework that inverts spectroscopic measurements into realistic atomistic structures and is applied to three previously contested problems in amorphous materials science. The project will receive $1.4 million over the course of two years.

“Generative models have taken the world by storm, but remain challenging to use in experimental materials science,” said Daniel. “Our work is bringing these methods closer to reality by deducing the complex structures of amorphous materials and automating the detective work needed to produce synthesis-structure relationships with our colleagues in the lab.”

Phase two of the program will move from theory and simulation to full experimental verification. Dr. Schwalbe-Koda will work closely with Amalie Trewartha, a Staff Research Scientist at TRI, along with experimentalists and characterization experts who will put his computational predictions to the test. 

“Amorphous materials are vital for the next generation of EV batteries, but notoriously difficult to model," said Amalie. “Daniel's work has made enormous progress in unlocking the potential of AI-driven discovery for these materials, and is already showing real-world results in the lab.”