The Polymer Society of Korea

Abstract

As a synthetic polymer chemist, I have always enjoyed working with polymer physicists and computational scientists who can reveal the underlying mechanisms and explain why our polymers behave as they do. I also had the privileges of inspiring my colleagues and providing model polymers and their characterization data to see if theories and simulations could explain the experimental results. We envision the next step as embracing AI and building a self-driving laboratory (SDL) where AI handles polymer synthesis, analyzes the resulting polymers, learns to improve their performance, and designs the next set of experiments without human intervention once the target is set. To this end, I will present our collaborative work in which polymer synthesis and simulations meet, enabling us to better understand the importance of polymer architecture in structure-property relationships. I will also briefly discuss our initiative to set up an automated synthesis system, as a first step to SDL.