Materials Design and Informatics Group

Department of Chemistry

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Department of Chemistry

University College London

London WC1H 0AJ

Materials Design and Informatics Group (MDIG) is a research collective, working to accelerate develoment of new green energy materials. We are based at UCL, in the Department of Chemistry.

We use a combination of data-driven methods (such as deep learning and Bayesian statistics) and quantum mechanics calculations to design new materials on computers and to help accelerate the experimental characterisation of materials. We work with other academics, national facilities and companies.

news

Oct 28, 2025 News and views artcile in Nature Machine Intelligence: Accelerating molecular dynamics by going with the flow
Sep 28, 2025 A new collaboration with my office buddy!Learning radical excited states from sparse data
Aug 12, 2025 New 3 yr PostDoc position available in MDIG. Research Fellow in Machine Learning for Materials Design
Jul 25, 2025 New preprint alert - Learning disentangled latent representations facilitates discovery and design of functional materials
Jul 17, 2025 New preprint alert The carbon cost of materials discovery: Can machine learning really accelerate the discovery of new photovoltaics?

selected publications

  1. Computational screening of all stoichiometric inorganic materials
    Daniel W Davies, Keith T Butler, Adam J Jackson, and 4 more authors
    Chem 2016
  2. Machine learning for molecular and materials science
    Keith T Butler, Daniel W Davies, Hugh Cartwright, and 2 more authors
    Nature 2018
  3. Designing interfaces in energy materials applications with first-principles calculations
    Keith T Butler, Gopalakrishnan Sai Gautam, and Pieremanuele Canepa
    npj Computational Materials 2019
  4. Distributed representations of atoms and materials for machine learning
    Luis M Antunes, Ricardo Grau-Crespo, and Keith T Butler
    npj Computational Materials 2022
  5. Entropy-based active learning of graph neural network surrogate models for materials properties
    Johannes Allotey, Keith T Butler, and Jeyan Thiyagalingam
    The Journal of Chemical Physics 2021
  6. Interpretable and explainable machine learning for materials science and chemistry
    Felipe Oviedo, Juan Lavista Ferres, Tonio Buonassisi, and 1 more author
    Accounts of Materials Research 2022