About the Guest Editors | Self-Driving Laboratories for Chemistry and Materials Science

Andy Sode Anker, PhD, Oxford University, UK; Technical University of Denmark, Denmark
Dr. Andy Sode Anker is a postdoctoral fellow at the Technical University of Denmark and a sponsored researcher at the University of Oxford. As an independent researcher, he leads projects at the intersection of materials chemistry, machine learning, and robotics, aiming to advance the field of self-driving laboratories. Dr. Anker has been awarded a 4,000,000 DKK postdoctoral grant to further his academic career in this area. Recognized for his contributions, he was named to Forbes’ internationally acclaimed ’30 Under 30 Europe’ list in the Science and Healthcare category. He obtained his PhD in materials chemistry from the University of Copenhagen, where he specialised in nanoparticle analysis using advanced X-ray scattering techniques. During his doctoral studies, he also developed machine learning methods to analyse experimental scattering data and collaborated with the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and the Scientific Machine Learning Group on matching simulated and experimental data in materials chemistry.

​Sterling Baird, PhD, University of Toronto, Canada
Sterling is the Director of Training and Programs at the Acceleration Consortium, where he leads the development of course content, workshops, hackathons, and an in-person training and prototyping facility for self-driving labs. He obtained his B.Sc. in Applied Physics and M.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from Brigham Young University in 2018 and 2021, respectively. Sterling obtained his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Utah in 2023 in Dr. Taylor Sparks’ materials informatics group, where he was awarded the Gregory B. McKenna graduate fellowship. During his Ph.D., he used machine learning to discover new materials for energy and structural applications and has made notable contributions to the field of materials informatics. From May 2021 to May 2023, he published ten first-author peer-reviewed manuscripts, co-authored five manuscripts, and delivered nine oral presentations and two tutorials. Sterling’s contributions extend beyond publications and presentations. He made thousands of contributions across hundreds of code repositories and contributed over one hundred thousand lines of open-source code to materials informatics projects. Sterling is passionate about data-driven materials discovery enabled by Bayesian optimization, self-driving laboratories, and educational platforms that reduce the barrier to entry for state-of-the-art algorithms and equipment. In addition to his research interests, Sterling enjoys spending time with his family, eating delicious food, breakdancing, and studying Japanese.

​Linus Pithan, PhD, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron(DESY), Germany
Dr. Linus Pithan is the Group Leader in Experiment Control for Photon Science at DESY. He is a physicist and software expert with experience in european synchrotron laboratoriesand academia.While his scientific research focused around X-ray surface diffraction, and molecular thin films, he has also strong ties into software groups at several synchrotron facility that provide controls software solutions for synchrotron experiments e.g. through his contributions to the development of the experiment orchestration tool BLISS at the European Synchrotron ESRF and his engagement in the Tango Controls, Sardana and BlueSky communities.   He obtained the PhD degree from Department of Physics of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2016. Then he joined as a Postdoctoral Researcher and a software engineer in ESRF – The European Synchrotron from 2016 to 2021. Then he worked at the Institute for Applied Physics, University of Tuebingen, Germany from 2021 to 2023 in the framework of German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) program with focus on Data from Photon and Neutron Experiments (DAPHNE4NFDI). In this time he developed an additional research focus on machine learning applied to scattering data and initiated work on autonomous experimentation. In 2023he joined DESY as  group leader  where his also a work package lead in the ROCK-IT project (Remote, Operando Controlled, Knowledge-driven, and IT-based) that aims to develop tools for automation and remote access of in-situ and operando experiments.  Further he contributes to the planning of the experiment support for the upcoming PETRA IV synchrotron facility.