In 2023, Dr Emily Moore, Academic Director of the Troost Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering attended the Accelerate 2023 conference.  

“I kept hearing everyone talking about going faster, solving the sustainability crisis and all these good things, but I couldn’t help but wonder, how do we make sure what we’re doing is ‘green?’” said Dr Moore. “That’s what my project has set out to discover.”

One of the mission statements of the Acceleration Consortium is to find ethical solutions. This includes considering economics, and Indigenous knowledges to ensure materials and technologies are ethically designed with community partners to benefit society and the planet and do not cause unintended harm. Dr Moore’s question aligned perfectly to these goals.

To find the answer to her query, Dr Moore’s research project is taking a holistic look at self-driving labs (SDLs) to explore their entire lifecycle. Even when accelerated, the discovery process is lengthy- from synthesis and optimization, to scale-up, application development and testing- before any new technology reaches the market. There are potentially enormous social, economic, and environmental issues to contend with at each step.

“History is, unfortunately, full of examples where a technological advancement has come at a sharp price later, “said Dr Moore. “Chlorofluorocarbons brought us air conditioning, for example, but almost destroyed the ozone layer. It’s important that as we accelerate and automate the development of new materials, we find ways to ensure that emerging issues will be identified.”

Dr Moore received a 2023 Accelerate Seed Grant from the Acceleration Consortium to do this research. Accelerate Seed grants build accelerated discovery capacity at the University of Toronto by helping faculty enter the field or collaborate with those already doing accelerated discovery. The team includes Senior Research Associate Dr. Andrea Chan from the Troost Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering and Scientific Advisor Dr. Cesar Urbina-Blanco from Sunthetics.

The team will start with the presumption that the earliest possible consideration of social and environmental criteria will help to mitigate the risks of unintended consequences with SDLs.  

“There has been a lot of research into integrating sustainability criteria in the earliest stages of product design; principles like ‘green chemistry’ are a great example,” said Dr Moore. “But there are significant challenges to bringing them all the way back before we get to the product design stage- into the lab at the start of the materials discovery process. We’re trying to figure out how can we prioritize sustainability at that initial material formulation stage.”

Over the next year, Dr Moore and her team will conduct a series of in-depth interviews with SDL researchers working at various stages in the materials discovery to application development pipeline. They will also interview government and policy stakeholders and environmental organizations. Through these interviews, the team will seek to understand the current state of sustainability in accelerated materials discovery and map it to the development cycle.  

“Our goal is to identify key points of intervention for bringing in considerations of social and environmental criteria,” said Dr Moore. “Then we plan to have workshops with SDL researchers to discuss opportunities and best practices for incorporating social, environmental, and economic factors in SDL development processes. It’s a very integrated and collaborative approach to the research – one my team is very excited about.”

Dr Moore sees this research as a way to connect with the existing scientific community and support them on their sustainability journey.  

“There is a lot of opportunity,” said Dr Moore. “When future researchers build an SDL, the research we do now will help them think holistically about things like factoring in solvent selection at the outset, factoring in green chemicals into their Bayesian interfaces, or what the impacts of their raw material sources will be on the environment. The earlier people think about these parameters in their SDL, the more the worlds of sustainability and accelerated discovery will connect.”

The next round of Accelerate Seed Grant applications open May 30, 2024.

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