Speakers
Kourosh Darvish
Bio: Kourosh Darvish is a staff scientist and principal investigator at the AI and Automation Lab in the Acceleration Consortium at the University of Toronto since 2024. Previously, he served as a postdoctoral researcher at the Computer Science and Robotics Institute of the University of Toronto (UofT) and was a member of the Vector Institute. Before joining UofT in 2022, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). In 2019, he completed his PhD in Bioengineering and Robotics from the University of Genoa, Italy. He earned his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Aerospace Engineering from K.N. Toosi University of Technology and Sharif University of Technology (Tehran, Iran) in 2012 and 2014, respectively. His research focuses on robot learning, robotics for scientific discoveries, shared autonomy, humanoid robotics manipulation, and optimal control.
Phillip M. Maffettone
Bio: Dr. Phillip M. Maffettone is a Computational Scientist in the Data Science and Systems Integration Division at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. His research focuses on accelerating scientific discovery at user facilities through the integration of robotics, artificial intelligence, and advanced experiment orchestration systems. He leads the N3XTware project, constructing the software architecture for the next 12 experiment end stations to be built at NSLS-II. Prior to this he built the brain on the world’s first mobile robotic scientist at the University of Liverpool, and later spearheaded the machine learning platform for a biotechnology start-up, BigHat Biosciences. He holds a DPhil in Inorganic Chemistry from the University of Oxford and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University at Buffalo.
Lilo Pozzo
Naruki Yoshikawa
Bio: Naruki Yoshikawa is an assistant professor at the Institute of Science Tokyo, where he conducts research on laboratory automation aimed at accelerating scientific discovery. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 2024 under the supervision of Alán Aspuru-Guzik. Prior to that, he received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from The University of Tokyo. His research focuses on developing robotic systems for automated scientific experiments, designing low-cost open hardware with 3D printing technologies, and exploring applications of large language models to advance scientific research.
Leon Budde
