Invited Speakers

Shelly Conroy, Imperial College London
Kim Jelfs, Imperial College London
Dylan Owen, University of Birmingham
Rob Palgrave, University College London
Shijing Sun, University of Cambridge

Sam Cooper

Dr Sam Cooper leads the TLDR group at Imperial College London who focus on the application of AI to materials science. Recently publications have focused on the use of generative AI to create 3D microstructural data from a 2D image [1], conditionalized models to map processing parameters to the microstructure of battery electrodes [2], and the representation of scientific concepts inside LLMs [3]. Dr Cooper was recently awarded a £2M EPSRC Open Plus Fellow in AI for Materials Science with Deep Reproducibility. In 2024 he spun-out a company, www.polaron.ai, to bring IP developed at Imperial to manufacturers around the world. Polaron were the winners of the inaugural Manchester prize and recently raised an $8M seed round. In 2017, Dr Cooper created the online course “Mathematics for Machine Learning” on Coursera which has since been taken by over 700,000 learners.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-021-00322-1
[2] https://www.cell.com/matter/fulltext/S2590-2385(24)00446-6
[3] https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2025/dd/d5dd00374a

Sarah Haigh

Sarah Haigh is a Professor of Materials Characterisation at the University of Manchester, UK. Her research interests centre on improving our understanding of nanomaterials structure and properties using advanced transmission electron microscope (TEM) imaging and analysis techniques. She has a particular interest in (i) advanced TEM characterisation of functional 2D materials and vertical stacked heterostructures, (ii) in developing in situ TEM imaging methods and (iii) application of automated imaging and analysis approaches. She is Vice Dean of Research and Innovation in the Faculty of Science and Engineering and also Director of the bp International Centre for Advanced Materials. She has published more than 200 peer reviewed journal papers and 5 book chapters.

Kim Jelfs

Prof. Kim Jelfs is a Professor of Computational Materials Chemistry and Royal Society Faraday Discovery Fellow in the Department of Chemistry at Imperial College. Her group specialises in the use of computer simulations and artificial intelligence to assist in the discovery of supramolecular materials, particularly porous materials and organic electronics, working closely with experimental collaborators. Kim was the 2022 Blavatnik Awards Laureate in Chemistry, and was awarded a 2025 Royal Society of Chemistry Corday-Morgan Prize. She is co-Director of the EPSRC AI hub for Chemistry (AIchemy), co-Director of the Institute for Digital Molecular Design and Fabrication at Imperial and an Associate Editor for Chemical Communications.

Andrew McCluskey

Andrew is originally from Glasgow, where he attended the second most violent school in Scotland. He has studied and worked in Edinburgh, Connecticut, Bath, Oxford, and Copenhagen before joining Bristol in August 2023. There, he leads the SCAMs@bristol research group, which focuses on improving analysis and simulation methods in neutron scattering to better understand dynamics in liquid and liquid-like systems.