Professor Jacqueline Cole
Jacqui is the Sir Henry Royce Institute Challenge Lead in AI for Materials Discovery, Characterisation and Application. This focuses on digitally transforming the Royce within the cross-thematic ‘Materials 4.0’ scope of the National Materials Innovation Strategy.
Jacqui is also Head of Molecular Engineering at the University of Cambridge, and the Cambridge lead for two of the EPSRC-funded UK AI Hubs, AIchemy and APRIL, where she is accelerating data-driven materials discovery using AI for chemistry and electronics, respectively.
She combines artificial intelligence with data science, machine-learning algorithms, computational methods and experimental research to afford a ‘design-to-device’ pipeline for data-driven materials discovery.
She is particularly well known for provisioning the global research community with open-access materials databases of experimental information, machine-learning code and models for property prediction and language models that are tailored for the materials domain.
Her research is highly interdisciplinary. Accordingly, she holds two PhDs: one in Physics from the University of Cambridge and one in Chemistry from the University of Durham.
Before moving to Cambridge, she held a post-doctoral position in Physics at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. Prior to this, she undertook a PhD in Chemistry through an international studentship between the Institute Laue Langevin, Grenoble, France, and Durham University. Her university studies began at Durham University where she graduated with first class honours in Chemistry in 1994.
She has also obtained a BSc Hons degree in Mathematics (2000-4), a diploma in Statistics (2004-5), a Certificate in Astronomy and Planetary Science (2006-7), a Diploma in Physics (2007-8) and a BEng Hons degree in Engineering (2010-14) all through the Open University.
