The Robotic Alchemist – Digital Chemistry

Speaker: Lee Cronin, Regius Professor – Chair of Chemistry,
University of Glasgow

Prof. Lee Cronin is a leading figure in the fields of chemistry, artificial intelligence, and robotics. His groundbreaking work focuses on digitizing chemistry and automating chemical discovery, earning him the nickname “The Robotic Alchemist.”
Coined by Cronin, “chemputation” refers to the computational execution of chemical synthesis.
The Chemputer is a universal, programmable chemical robot that executes chemical synthesis from digital code. It reduces chemistry to uniform operations—such as mixing, heating, and filtering—that can be executed by machines.
It is capable of running hundreds of experiments in parallel and aims to create a global digital ecosystem for chemistry, enabling collaboration, reproducibility, and acceleration of discovery.
XDL (Chemical Description Language) is a formal language to write and share chemical procedures, similar to source code for computers. XDL is written to control robotic synthesis platforms.
Robotic Platforms use machine learning to optimize reactions, identify new compounds, or rediscover forgotten ones e.g finding inorganic molecules with therapeutic potential.
His innovations have accelerated molecular discovery, reduced experimental waste, and are making chemistry more universally programmable.

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