News & Events

How do we prepare the next generation of scientists to navigate research in the emerging AI landscape? MATRIX-Uni gives undergraduate fellows hands-on, interdisciplinary experience that helps them explore the possibilities of AI while developing the skills to wield it as a tool for scientific discovery.

NSF-MMLI is proud to announce that Prof. Heng Ji, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has been honored as an ACL Fellow for 2025 by the Association for Computational Linguistics. This recognition celebrates her significant contributions to information extraction, multimodal and multilingual knowledge extraction, and AI for science.

The U.S. National Science Foundation has renewed its support for the Molecule Maker Lab Institute (MMLI) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with a new five-year, $15 million award. As a National AI Research Institute, MMLI is pioneering artificial intelligence tools that accelerate the discovery and synthesis of functional molecules for use in medicine, energy, and industry. Led by Professor Huimin Zhao, the institute has already produced impactful innovations like AlphaSynthesis and closed-loop molecule development systems, and it now aims to develop next-generation AI agents, including large language models for chemistry and generative tools for catalyst discovery.