June 11, 2025 — NC State MSE Assistant Professor Martin Seifrid has been selected to receive the 2025 Scialog Collaborative Innovation Award, recognizing his role in an ambitious multi-institutional project focused on advancing automation in chemical laboratories.
The 18 individual awards of $60,000 in direct costs will go to 16 researchers from a variety of institutions in the United States and Canada. Seifrid is one of the researchers who was awarded funding through the Scialog: Automating Chemical Laboratories initiative, a collaborative program co-sponsored by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA), the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, and the Frederick Gardner Cottrell Foundation.
As part of the winning project titled “CRISIS: Comprehensive Reproducibility Initiative for Scientific Integrity and Standardization,” Seifrid joins co-investigators Mark Hendricks (Whitman College) and Jessica Sampson (University of Delaware) in tackling one of the most pressing challenges in modern science: ensuring reproducibility and integrity in automated research workflows. Their project aims to establish open-source, modular systems for reproducible automation in chemical experimentation—bridging materials science, chemistry, and software engineering.
“Automation has enormous potential to accelerate discovery, but we have to build it on a foundation of reproducibility and trust,” said Seifrid. “That’s what makes this initiative so exciting, it brings together researchers from across disciplines to rethink how we design and document automated experiments from the ground up.”
The 2025 awards mark the second round of funding in the Scialog automation series, which fosters high-risk, high-reward collaborations born from intensive, interdisciplinary dialogue. The awards were announced following a four-day workshop in Tucson, Arizona, where 45 early-career researchers formed teams and pitched bold proposals to reimagine the chemical laboratory through artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation.
Scialog, which blends “science” and “dialogue”, catalyzes fresh thinking across research boundaries. For Seifrid, who joined NC State MSE in 2022, the award continues his trajectory as a rising leader at the intersection of materials science, computation, and experimental design.
The final Scialog meeting for this initiative will take place in April 2026, offering another opportunity to share progress and build lasting collaborations across the scientific community.
In 2024, Seifrid was also honored with a competitive Scialog: Automating Chemical Laboratories Collaborative Innovation Award to support his team’s groundbreaking work in automated chemistry.
Research Corporation for Science Advancement published the original article.