Short intro:

Self-driving laboratories (SDLs) or Materials Acceleration Platform (MAPs) hold the promise to accelerate the discovery of novel materials for the green transition. I will show some recent developments in two highly related field 1) battery materials from the large-scale European research initiative, the Battery Interface Genome – Materials Acceleration Platform (BIG-MAP), and 2) the discovery of novel electrocatalysts for Power-2-X from our Pioneer Center for Accelerating P2X Materials Discovery (CAPeX). A central element in both is the development of a closed-loop MAP/SDL infrastructure, where multiple and geographically distributed laboratories or tenants can work jointly using autonomous workflows to co-optimize materials and device-level properties.

Biography:

Professor Tejs Vegge is Head of the section for Autonomous Materials Discovery at DTU Energy, Technical University of Denmark, and the Director of the 13-year and M45$ Danish National Research Foundation “Pioneer Center for Accelerating P2X Materials Discovery” (CAPeX). He is an expert in computational and AI-accelerated discovery of advanced battery materials, electrocatalysts, and next-generation energy storage solutions, and has published more than 220 papers on accelerating the discovery and innovation process of clean energy materials. His approaches are fundamental in nature but maintain a clear focus on scalability and commercial viability.

Professor Vegge is a pioneer in developing transdisciplinary approaches and workflows for computer- and AI-accelerated discovery of nanostructured catalysts for Power2X, battery materials, and electrochemical interfaces. He has pioneered the work on predictive atomic-scale characterization and inverse design of energy materials directly for their industrial operating conditions, enabling the transition from model systems to complex materials and systems for sustainable production and storage of renewable energy in batteries, e-fuels, and e-chemicals.

This includes coupling quantum chemical calculation at the density functional theory (DFT) level, experimental techniques such as X-ray diffraction, and electrochemical characterization, which have provided groundbreaking insights and understanding of catalysts in their active state. His work on the integration of DFT and uncertainty-aware machine learning (ML) techniques has had a particular impact on the ability to describe, understand, and accurately predict reactions and dynamic processes that occur at electrochemical liquid-solid interfaces at much longer time- and length-scales, as well as methods for determining and assigning uncertainties to quantum chemical calculations and ML models for predicting chemical reaction rates.

As a member of the Government’s Commission for the Green Conversion of Passenger Cars (2019-2021), Prof. Vegge also contributed his scientific understanding of battery materials development to enhance the scientific content in the public debate and the political decision-making process. He is also the co-founder and CSO of the deep green tech startup PhaseTree (2021), which provides a cloud-based multi-scale materials design platform for the accelerated design of clean energy materials.

Prof. Vegge has established and leads two of the world’s largest international and interdisciplinary consortia on developing “Materials Acceleration Platforms” (MAPs) or self-driving laboratories (SDLs) for accelerated materials discovery, i.e., CAPeX and the large-scale Battery Interface Genome–Materials Acceleration Platform (BIG-MAP) initiative under BATTERY 2030+. In 2019, the global initiative Mission Innovation awarded him the Champion Award for this work.