North Carolina State University (NC State) Now Runs the Largest Academic Self-Driving Lab Ecosystem in the US
Finding a new molecule or material has always been a waiting game. A scientist forms a hypothesis, runs experiments one variable at a time, reads the results, then decides what to try next. With so many possible recipes to test, that loop can stretch across years and burn through serious budgets before anything useful shows up. At NC State University, Professor Milad Abolhasani and his team set out to remove that bottleneck by letting the lab run and reason on its own, around the clock.
- Self-driving labs close the loop between doing and learning: AI plans the next experiment, robots run it, and the system uses every result to pick a smarter move
- Work that once took years of manual trial and error can now be compressed into days or even hours, with far less chemical waste
- The approach reaches solutions in weeks and at a fraction of the traditional R&D cost, freeing budgets for the problems that matter
- Scientists stay in charge: humans set the goal and interpret the meaning, while automation and AI handle the grind of getting there
- NC State now operates the largest self-driving lab ecosystem of any US academic institution, with a recent $2.9M Department of Energy award to push automated fuel and chemical manufacturing further
When the lab never sleeps and learns from every run, the real question stops being "how long will this take" and starts being "what should we discover next."
People and Institutions involved: Milad Abolhasani (Alcoa Professor and University Faculty Scholar, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering) and the Abolhasani Lab, NC State University. Article by H'Rina DeTroy, NC State News. Related work supported in part by the US Department of Energy.
Published on:
NC State News
Original article: https://news.ncsu.edu/2026/06/speeding-up-scientific-discovery/
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