Professor Andrew Cooper | 2021 Interdisciplinary Prize winner

Professor Andrew Cooper FRSC

Winner: 2021 Interdisciplinary Prize

University of Liverpool

For combining autonomous robotics, artificial intelligence and chemistry to discover materials with new properties.

Celebrate Professor Andrew Cooper

#RSCPrizes

It was a huge technical challenge to build an autonomous robot chemist, requiring skills across the areas of chemistry, computer science and robotics.

Professor Cooper and his team are building robots powered by artificial intelligence that can search for new materials to tackle important problems, such as energy. Their aim is to develop robots that can find new combinations of materials that would not be discovered by more conventional research approaches.

Read winner biography

Professor Andy Cooper is a Nottingham graduate (1991) and also obtained his PhD there in 1994. After his PhD, he held an 1851 Fellowship and a Royal Society NATO Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, and then a Ramsay Memorial Research Fellowship at the Melville Laboratory for Polymer Synthesis in Cambridge. In 1999, he was appointed a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in Liverpool, where he is now the Academic Director of the Materials Innovation Factory at the University of Liverpool. He is also the Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Functional Materials Design.

Andy's main research interests are organic materials and materials for energy production and molecular separation. This is underpinned by a strong interest in high-throughput methods and autonomous robotics. A unifying theme in his research is the close fusion of computational prediction and experiments to discover new materials with step change properties. He was elected to the Royal Society in 2015 and was awarded the Hughes Medal in 2019. He is also currently serving as the Editor-in-chief of Chemical Science.

Q+A

What motivates you?

Understanding new things for the first time is one of few activities that never gets boring.

What advice would you give to a young person considering a career in chemistry?

Choose colleagues/collaborators that have a different perspective to you, and who you enjoy working with – the latter is important. Take work seriously, but not too much, and don’t compromise on time with friends and family.

Can you tell us about a scientific development on the horizon that you are excited about?

Putting a chemistry ‘brain’ in the robot chemist. At the moment, it is very good at optimising things, but it doesn’t understand what it is optimising.

What does good research culture look like/mean to you?

Diverse, fun, kind and mostly doing research for the love of it. Easy to say, much harder to achieve and maintain.