Time: 15:30, October 29, 2026

Venue: Lecture Theatre A204, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering Building

Speaker: Omar M. Yaghi
              Distinguished Chair Professor and Founding Director of AIMATRY at Tsinghua University, the 2025 Nobel laureate in Chemistry

Introduction: 
The convergence of artificial intelligence and materials science is moving chemistry from an age of scarcity to one of abundance. Reticular chemistry has already created an immense universe of possible metal–organic frameworks, covalent organic frameworks, and related materials, while AI, machine learning, automation, and robotics are making it increasingly possible to generate, predict, synthesize, and evaluate these structures at unprecedented scale. As this capability grows, the central scientific challenge changes: it is no longer simply how to discover a material, but how to select the right material from an almost limitless space of possibilities. I call this emerging discipline Selection Science. It brings together AI and experiment in a continuous cycle of generate, select, make, measure, learn, and regenerate, with human judgment guiding what is worth pursuing. I will give several examples from reticular chemistry where this new paradigm is applied. In these examples, AI does not merely accelerate materials discovery; it becomes interwoven with matter itself, learning from experiment and helping determine which possibilities should become reality. The goal is to connect molecule to material, device, society, and back again, transforming abundance into useful solutions for energy, water, health, and the environment.