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Alán Aspuru-Guzik's lab built Medusa, an open-source, open-design self-driving system for organic synthesis. No experiments were running at the time this photo was taken, and the equipment was turned off.
Alán Aspuru-Guzik’s nearly 2 decades of research can’t be narrowed down to a single scientific field. But the flurry of ideas coming from his lab fits, if precariously, under a grander theme: expansion. “I’m very interested in exploring life,” he says. “When there are opportunities that expand my horizon, I will take them.”
Vitals
Hometown: Mexico City
Education: BSc, chemistry, National Autonomous University of Mexico, 1999; PhD, physical chemistry, University of California, Berkeley, 2004
Current position: Professor of chemistry and computer science, University of Toronto; CIFAR AI chair, Vector Institute
Start-up companies founded: Axiomatic AI, Calculario (now part of Kyulux), Intrepid Labs, Kebotix, and Zapata AI
Memorable mentor: Carlos Amador-Bedolla, my undergraduate adviser
Professional advice: A quote from my PhD adviser, William A. Lester Jr.: “People do science. Don’t forget that scientists are people.”
Nickname: Nopal, after Nopal BBS, a bulletin board system I ran from 1992 till 1994
Hobbies: Street art, photography, and running
I am: Mexicano, Latino, Chilango, a secular Jew
For Aspuru-Guzik, a professor of chemistry and computer science at the University of Toronto, the possibilities of the unknown are what have driven his laboratory to the interfaces of quantum computing, machine learning, and chemistry.
Aspuru-Guzik blurs the lines between everything: theoretical and experimental chemistry, art and science, and creativity and stiffness. “For Alán, disciplines are artificial,” says Joel Yuen-Zhou, who received his PhD from Aspuru- Guzik’s lab in 2012 and now serves as an associate professor of chemistry at the University of California San Diego. Aspuru-Guzik’s interests span art, literature, music, and science, which made him an “infinite source of creativity and vision,” Yuen-Zhou says. “He empowered us to think outside of the box.”
This attitude came out of a near-death experience in a car crash when he was 19. As a friend drove him back from a party in Cuernavaca, the friend hit the side wall of the freeway with the car. “I had this major operation and started thinking that life is very finite,” he says. “I have a sense of urgency. You could die tomorrow, so if you want to try something, you should try it now.”
Aspuru-Guzik’s introduction to computers came when he was a kid. He would engage in phreaking, a form of hacking into telecommunication systems to make free calls. He says that while he used this technique to download software from abroad, he also had some fun with it. When Mexico beat Argentina in a 1990 soccer game, “my friends and I would call a bunch of people in Argentina to remind them of the loss.”
After his undergraduate studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Aspuru-Guzik went on to complete his graduate studies in quantum computing in the lab of William A. Lester Jr. at the University of California, Berkeley. Aspuru-Guzik had a “profound effect on reshaping the mode of operation for the computational research in my group,” says Lester, noting how Aspuru-Guzik took a leadership role in the lab early on.
Since Aspuru-Guzik started his independent career at Harvard University in 2006, he has been constantly widening his group’s research focus. He initially studied quantum mechanics and has expanded his research to include artificial intelligence and self-driving labs. “I always wanted to be at the interface of technology and chemistry—to ride technological trends in order to open up the path for these new fields to develop,” Aspuru-Guzik says.
He led the founding of the Harvard Clean Energy Project, an open-access project designed to search for possible molecules that could be used in organic solar cells. When his research team invented new algorithms for near-term quantum computers, or computers that are available but not totally accurate, he cofounded a start-up, Zapata AI. The company, which is named after Emiliano Zapata Salazar, a Mexican revolutionary of the early 1900s, went public in March. He describes being at the New York Stock Exchange as a surreal moment. “It’s a huge achievement and something I hope for all of my companies.”
He thought he was going to stay at Harvard for the rest of his career, but in the 2010s, the changing political landscape in the US disturbed him—at the time, he cited the 2016 election of Donald J. Trump and overpoliticized funding mechanisms for science. Aspuru-Guzik sought opportunities for new growth and decided to move to the University of Toronto in 2018.
The move has allowed him to expand his focus beyond just theoretical chemistry. After receiving funding from the Canadian government as a Canada 150 Research Chair, Aspuru-Guzik was able to build an experimental side to his lab. “We needed to close the gap between what is theoretical chemistry and what is experimental chemistry and use computers to drive experiments rather than use humans,” he says.
Aspuru-Guzik says he’s been happy with the social and political climate in Canada, along with the Canadian government’s approach to funding research. “I’m funded in a way that allows us to write less grants and focus more on science,” he says.
Life is very finite. I have a sense of urgency. You could die tomorrow, so if you want to try something, you should try it now.
In addition to running a research lab, he serves as the director of the Acceleration Consortium, a University of Toronto–based initiative that aims to use self-driving labs (SDLs) to rapidly design, make, and test new materials. In April 2023, the consortium received a $200 million grant from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund, the largest federal research grant ever awarded to a Canadian university. “It’s an honor to lead the project,” Aspuru-Guzik says. “The project is a platform to build people’s careers and take us into new research directions that will hopefully take Canada into a leadership position on the topic of SDLs.”
Credit: Carlos Osorio
One of Alán Aspuru-Guzik's collaborations created the brightest compound ever for use in solid-state organic lasers.
As part of a federal mandate to engage with Indigenous communities, the Acceleration Consortium engages in research on ethics and Indigenous science and technology with Indigenous scholars. The goal is to ensure it designs new technologies, like SDLs, with equity and sustainability in mind. Research into new technologies raises questions about governance, access, and possible weaponization. “Our team started thinking, ‘How do we accelerate science while at the same time slow down to think about how to do this in an ethical manner?’ ” Aspuru-Guzik says.
When M. Murphy first met Aspuru- Guzik, “we instantly got into the questions of what’s exciting and what’s scary about the creation of SDLs and substance discovery,” says Murphy, who coleads the Technoscience Research Unit, serves as a main social science researcher at the consortium, and is Red River Métis. Murphy wants researchers to integrate questions around chemical risk management into substance discovery at the front end, before those substances end up harming lands, waters, and communities. The two discussed how researchers of substance discovery and SDLs could learn from Indigenous knowledges and perspectives and integrate that information into the consortium workflows.
“Alán was never intimidated by me bringing up questions that might challenge the foundations of the project,” Murphy says. “There was an enthusiasm for learning across differences.”
As his research efforts expand, Aspuru-Guzik is always thinking about how he can be a better leader. He takes concepts from X-teams, a book by MIT Sloan School of Management’s Deborah Ancona, to run his lab. “The whole idea is to have resources for all the scientists to be creative and work together,” he says. “I want to build as multidisciplinary and diverse a set of training as possible for my group. I give them multidisciplinary missions and empower them to come up with solutions.”
He thinks about both the scientific and social diversity of his group, which now includes organic chemists, AI scientists, robotic scientists, computational chemists, and inorganic chemists. Also, students from Latin America make up 20–25% of his group at any given time, and he maintains a relationship with UNAM, inviting visiting students to work in his lab and making annual visits to give research talks.
Pushing the boundaries of fields and scientific questions has defined Aspuru-Guzik’s careers. As his lab ventures into new fundamental questions about the capability of AI and robot chemists, the possibilities of the unknown continue to guide him. “To be open to colearning across differences, you have to have a real depth of curiosity,” Murphy says. That curiosity, they say, is what has made Aspuru-Guzik such a visionary scientist.
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