Partner Institutions

The Molecule Maker Lab Institute is a partnership between the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Pennsylvania State University, and Rochester Institute of Technology, funded by the National Science Foundation. We look forward to inviting new University partners as the Institute grows.

MMLI is led by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and is co-localized at Beckman Institute and Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. Founded in 1867, UIUC has been a global epicenter for many of the recent advances that make the MMLI possible. UIUC has historically been a center of global leadership in both Computer Science and Chemistry, with 11 Nobel Prizes amongst its faculty and alumni. UIUC’s Department of Chemistry is consistently ranked near the top and among the most elite chemistry departments in the United States by National Research Council and U.S. News and World Report. The department offers innovative and exciting research options in chemical biology and in analytical, inorganic, materials, organic, physical and theoretical chemistry. Thomas M. Siebel Center for Computer Science is the home for the Department of Computer Science at UIUC. The department, which is one of the top five Computer Science departments in the nation, has many faculty members who are recognized leaders in several key areas of artificial intelligence such as computer vision, machine listening, natural language processing, machine learning and robotics.

Penn State’s Department of Chemical Engineering, established in 1948, is recognized as one of the largest and most influential chemical engineering departments in the nation. The department is built upon the fundamentals of academic integrity, innovation in research, and commitment to the advancement of industry. Their research combines the principles of chemistry, biology, mathematics, and physics to solve some of today’s most pressing societal issues in human health, environmental sustainability, and energy. One of the many research areas of the department includes development of new materials and pathways to chemical products that are more affordable, sustainable, and environmentally beneficial.

The B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) was founded in 2001. The faculty and students of RIT are dedicated to advancing the fields of computing and information sciences through a robust scholarly agenda focusing on computing foundations, emerging technologies, interdisciplinary applications, and user-centered design of computing-based solutions to effectively address challenges faced by individuals, organizations, and a global society. The Department of Computer Science focuses on various research areas including artificial intelligence, where researchers work on projects in computer vision, robotics, virtual theatre, sensor networks, data mining, document recognition, and the theoretical foundations of decision-making.