Awarded for contributions to the field of digital chemistry and the chemical applications of artificial intelligence, machine learning and automation.
Chemical Science is delighted to announce the winner of our 2026 Lectureship, Professor Alán Aspuru-Guzik!
The Chemical Science Lectureship celebrates leading, independent researchers at all career stages who have made exceptional discoveries and innovations in their field within the last five years. This annual lectureship focuses on a specific subject area that aligns with the Chemical Science symposium each year, rotating to cover the breadth of the journal and all areas of the chemical sciences.
This year, the Lectureship focused on digital chemistry and Professor Alán Aspuru-Guzik was selected as the winner for his recent research on machine learning and automation. Alán will deliver the Lectureship at the 2026 Chemical Science Symposium on the same theme on 29–30 October in London, UK.
About our 2026 winner:
Photo credit: Carlos Osorio
Alán Aspuru-Guzik, University of Toronto
Alán Aspuru-Guzik is a professor of Chemistry and Computer Science at the University of Toronto, the Canada 150 Laureate in Theoretical Chemistry, and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He is also a CIFAR Fellow and co-directs CIFAR’s Accelerated Decarbonization program.
Alán directs the Acceleration Consortium, a University of Toronto strategic initiative that brings together researchers from industry, government, and academia to advance pre-competitive research related to the lab of the future. Before joining the University of Toronto, Alán began his independent career at Harvard University in 2006, where he was a full professor from 2013 to 2018. He received his B.Sc. from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1999 and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004, where he was a postdoctoral fellow from 2005 to 2006.
Alán’s research spans quantum information, machine learning, and chemistry. He pioneered the development of algorithms and experimental implementations of quantum computers and quantum simulators for chemical systems. His work has also examined the role of quantum coherence in excitonic energy transfer in photosynthetic complexes and accelerated discovery through calculations on organic semiconductors, organic photovoltaic materials, organic batteries, and organic light-emitting diodes.
He has worked extensively on molecular representations and generative models for learning molecular properties. His current interests include automation and autonomous chemical laboratories for accelerating scientific discovery as well as AI Scientists, in particular the El Agente project.
Alán has also made significant contributions to scientific publishing and editorial leadership. He served as the first Chemical Science Associate Editor for theoretical and computational chemistry. He is editor-in-chief of Digital Discovery, the Royal Society of Chemistry journal focused on data-driven approaches to scientific discoveries.
Among other recognitions, Alán has received the Google Focused Award for Quantum Computing, the Sloan Research Fellowship, and the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award. He won the Heinrich Emanuel Merck Award for Computational Sciences in 2025 and was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2025. He was selected by MIT Technology Review as one of the top innovators under 35 and received the Early Career Award in Theoretical Chemistry from the American Chemical Society. He is also an elected fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
In 2024, Alán received the University of Toronto President’s Impact Award and the 2024 PRISM Prize from the Istituto di Struttura della Materia.
Alán was named in Maclean’s 2024 Power List as one of Canada’s 100 most powerful people, in the AI category. In 2026, he was featured as a BetaKit Most Ambitious Canadian.
Alán has served as a co-founder and advisor of several companies.
Read Alán’s recent Chemical Science articles:
Photochemical post-functionalization of polystyrene enables accelerated chemical recycling
Stanley Lo, Angela Lin, Cher Tian Ser, Alán Aspuru-Guzik* and Helen Tran*
Chem. Sci., 2026, 17, DOI: 10.1039/D6SC03696A
Grammar-driven SMILES standardization with TokenSMILES
Luis Armando Gonzalez-Ortiz,* Lisset Noriega, Filiberto Ortiz-Chi, Gabriela Vidales-Ayala, Emmanuel Soberanis-Cáceres, Amilcar Meneses-Viveros,* Alan Aspuru-Guzik* and Gabriel Merino*
Chem. Sci., 2026,17, 1666-1675
Automated electrosynthesis reaction mining with multimodal large language models (MLLMs)
Shi Xuan Leong, Sergio Pablo-García, Zijian Zhang and Alán Aspuru-Guzik*
Chem. Sci., 2024,15, 17881-17891
Find out more about the 2026 Chemical Science Symposium on digital chemistry in the age of AI and machine learning where Alán will deliver the 2026 Lectureship on our event webpage.
