Persson

Their open letter has drawn more than 530 signatories from 67 countries so far, including prominent scientists like Michael E. Mann of the University of Pennsylvania; Dirk Messner, head of the German Environment Agency; Indian writer Amitav Ghosh; and Åsa Persson, research director of the Stockholm Environment Institute.

The Swedish part of the research group has also been led by Jenny Persson, professor at the Department of Molecular Biology at Umeå University.

"I'm very excited about this work as it applies novel data-driven methods to the age-old problem of accelerating synthesis and characterization," said senior author Kristin Persson, a faculty senior scientist in Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and UC Berkeley professor of materials science and engineering who also leads the Materials Project.

The technique sprouted from conversations between the Persson group and experimental collaborators Masha Elkin and Connor Delaney, former postdoctoral researchers in the John Hartwig group at UC Berkeley.

Now that they've demonstrated the automated workflow's potential, Persson and team hope to incorporate it into an automated laboratory that analyzes the NMR data of thousands or even millions of new chemical reactions at a time.