Jin Qian, a staff scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Chemical Sciences Division, has received two 2026 Scialog Collaborative Innovation Awards supporting new approaches to automated chemical research.
Qian was selected as a Fellow in the Scialog: Automating Chemical Laboratories initiative, which brought together 45 early-career researchers from chemistry, materials science, engineering, automated instrumentation, data science, and artificial intelligence. At the April meeting, organized by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA), participants formed new multidisciplinary teams and developed proposals for collaborative seed projects.
Qian is a co-investigator on two of the seven projects selected for funding:
Capturing the Moment: Trajectory-Controlled Automated Solid Synthesis via Microwave, with Zhiling Zheng of Washington University in St. Louis, will explore methods for precisely controlling microwave-assisted solid-state synthesis.
Autonomous Mechanism Discrimination in Heterogeneous Electrocatalysis, with Justin Bui of New York University, will combine high-throughput experimental data with candidate reaction networks to identify how electrocatalytic reactions proceed.
The awards also continue a historic connection between Berkeley Lab and RCSA, which supported some of Berkeley Lab founder Ernest Lawrence’s early research. Qian noted that this long-standing relationship makes the recognition especially meaningful.
The Scialog program is supported by RCSA, the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, and the Frederick Gardner Cottrell Foundation.
