Dean’s Distinguished Seminar Series

Sergei Kalinin is the Weston Fulton Chair Professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) and has a joint appointment with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory as the chief scientist for artificial intelligence and machine learning for physical sciences. In 2022-23, he was a principal scientist at Amazon Special Projects (Moonshot Factory). Before then, he spent 20 years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) where he was corporate fellow and group leader at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences. Kalinin received his M.S. degree from Moscow State University in 1998 and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania (with Dawn Bonnell) in 2002.

His research focuses on the applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence methods in materials synthesis, discovery and optimization and in automated experiment and autonomous imaging and characterization workflows in scanning transmission electron microscopy and scanning probes for applications including physics discovery, atomic fabrication, as well as mesoscopic studies of electrochemical, ferroelectric and transport phenomena via scanning probe microscopy. When at ORNL, he led several major programs integrating ML and physical sciences and instrumentation, including the Institute for Functional Imaging of Materials (IFIM 2014-19), the first program in the Department of Energy integrating ML and physical sciences, and the microscopy effort in INTERSECT program that realized first ML-controlled scanning probe and electron microscopes.

At UTK’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Kalinin participated in building one of the first efforts in the country on ML-driven materials exploration. At UTK, his team has now realized fully AI-controlled SPM and STEM systems and co-orchestration workflows between multiple characterization tools for scientific discovery. He has also taught multiple courses on ML for materials science and microscopy including Bayesian optimization methods.

Kalinin has co-authored more than 650 publications, with a total citation of ~55,000 and an h-index of ~117. He is a fellow of NAI, Academia Europaea, AAAS, RSC, AAIA, MRS, APS, IoP, IEEE, Foresight Institute and AVS; a recipient of the Feynmann Prize of Foresight Institute (2022), Blavatnik Award for Physical Sciences (2018), RMS Medal for Scanning Probe Microscopy (2015), Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) (2009); Burton Medal of Microscopy Society of America (2010); five R&D100 Awards (2008, 2010, 2016, 2018 and 2023); and a number of other distinctions. As part of his professional services, he organized many professional conferences and workshops at MRS, APS and AVS; for 15 years organized workshop series on PFM; and serves or served on multiple editorial boards including NPJ Comp. Mat., J. Appl. Phys, and Appl. Phys Lett.

Maria Gini is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Minnesota, where her research over the last 40 years has focused on autonomous agents’ decision-making for task allocation, robot exploration of unknown environments, swarm robotics, and teamwork. She is an ACM, AAAI, and IEEE fellow. She received the IJCAI Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service award (2024), ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award (2022), and the Computing Research Association A Nico Habermann Award (2019). She was recently awarded the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM).