Experts say $200-million grant awarded to U of T will drive ‘big science’ via the Acceleration Consortium

The $200-million Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF) grant awarded to the University of Toronto’s Acceleration Consortium will help build a world-leading centre for accelerated materials discovery and innovation.

The funding will support the consortium’s work on “self-driving labs” that realize the game-changing potential of AI by combining it with robotics and advanced computing to discover new materials and molecules in a fraction of the usual time and cost – from life-saving medications and biodegradable plastics to low-carbon cement and renewable energy.

With equity, diversity and inclusion guiding project implementation and research design, the Acceleration Consortium – a U of T institutional strategic initiative – will use the funding to commercialize ethically designed technologies and materials to benefit society and train today’s scientists with the skills they need to advance the emerging field of accelerated materials discovery. It will also examine critical issues regarding the application of the technology, including from environmental and Indigenous perspectives. 

“We realized we need to take a cue from self-driving cars and extended that concept to a self-driving lab, which uses AI and automation to carry out more experiments in a smarter way,” says Acceleration Consortium Director Alán Aspuru-Guzik, a professor in the departments of chemistry and computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science who is a CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

In particular, the funding will help the consortium rapidly create high-quality datasets to better train AI models and help validate the model’s predictions in real time.

Leaders and researchers from U of T and Acceleration Consortium spoke with U of T News about the impact the CFREF funding – the largest federal research grant ever awarded to a Canadian university – will have on the consortium’s game-changing work and unique model of cross-sector collaboration.