Peng Bai, associate professor of chemical engineering and member of M2M, received a Young Faculty Award from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA). He receives $500,000 over two years for his project to help discover new nanoporous materials that can selectively separate mixed compounds. He is building a machine learning framework to do this.
He also sees this project as a way to explore the integration of machine learning tools with existing bodies of knowledge. “From a research point of view, a very exciting aspect is how we can couple what we know from physics-based thermodynamic knowledge with data-based machine learning tools,” he says.