Assistant Professor - AI for Materials - Materials Science and Engineering

Position Description: The University of California, Berkeley invites applications for an approved faculty position at the non-tenured (tenure-track) Assistant Professor level in the area of AI for Materials. This appointment will start as a 100% Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) appointment, with the appointee joining the Bakar Institute for Digital Materials for the Planet (BIDMaP) in the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS) as a member, with access to its collaborative resources and postdoctoral program.

It is the intention to move to the position to a 50/50 split appointment between MSE and a future interdisciplinary data science unit if/when established in CDSS, with MSE as the home department. About the Units: The MSE department is part of the College of Engineering (COE) and maintains close ties with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).

It advances the understanding and design of materials through an interdisciplinary blend of chemistry, physics, and engineering, pairing rigorous fundamentals with modern, application-driven approaches. Our key strength is our collaborative, cross-disciplinary research community, with abundant opportunities for students and collaborators across campus and beyond.

BIDMaP is an institute in CDSS, a new college at Berkeley, with the goal of advancing the state-of-the-art in the core of computing, data science, and statistics, while making sustained progress on issues of human and societal significance. BIDMaP advances the synthesis, design, and translation of innovative materials aimed at mitigating critical global challenges.

Through the integration of pioneering chemistry with machine learning, artificial intelligence, and robotic automation, BIDMaP transforms materials innovation into targeted solutions for clean air, clean water, advanced batteries, and sustainable chemical production. About the Position: We seek outstanding candidates demonstrating the potential to build a world-class research program that uses and advances AI to enable transformational progress in materials science and engineering.

Research may span the development of new AI methods motivated by materials challenges, co-development of emergent AI with materials theory and experimentation, and the deployment of AI to accelerate materials research, discovery and innovation. Application areas are intentionally broad, encompassing the full breadth of materials science—from soft to hard matter and inorganic to organic systems—and all stages of the materials lifecycle, including synthesis, processing, modeling, theory, characterization, fabrication, integration, deployment, and reuse.

Candidates are encouraged to pursue interdisciplinary and non-traditional approaches, including autonomous experimentation and data generation, scientific foundation models, language-based methods, multimodal learning, robotics and automation, AI/ML methods for characterization, and techno-economic or lifecycle analysis.

The successful candidate will help position Berkeley at the global forefront of both AI and materials innovation while contributing actively to the intellectual communities of MSE and BIDMaP. UC Berkeley values the family needs of faculty, including dual career couples, single parents, or those who may have taken time off for family reasons.

For information about potential relocation to Berkeley, or career needs of accompanying partners and spouses, please visit the Office for Faculty Equity and Welfare's website .