Founder and Chief Science Officer
Citrine Informatics
Creating new materials for a sustainable world
Bryce Meredig’s company, Citrine Informatics, has created a materials informatics platform whose capabilities have real-world impact on environmental sustainability. “I wouldn’t necessarily describe Citrine as an ‘energy and sustainability company,’ but the reality is, a lot of the work we do has very strong energy and sustainability implications,” says Meredig, who founded Citrine along with two other co-founders in 2013. Since then, the company, which was designed with the goal of accelerating the development and utilization of new materials using artificial intelligence and data, has grown into a team of almost 50.
“The company specifically produces a cloud-based materials informatics platform that has two key components: materials data infrastructure—storing and structuring the information about different materials, their properties and what they can do—and artificial intelligence that can learn from these data sets and guide new materials research and development,” explains Meredig.
Currently, Meredig works as the chief science officer. His focus is on Citrine’s technology development at the interface between artificial intelligence and materials science. In addition, he heads up the company’s various research collaborations with universities and national labs, including one study with Northwestern.
As a graduate of The Graduate School at Northwestern, Meredig received his PhD in materials science and engineering in 2012. It was during his time at Northwestern that he became interested in applying machine learning to problems that were occurring in the materials science field. “I think the work that we did [during that time] represents some of the earlier results in the field,” says Meredig. “We started doing this work eight years ago. That was where, I think, we started to see some of the significant potential at the intersection of AI and materials.” Besides refining his research focuses at Northwestern, Meredig also feels that the university provided top-of-the-line mentoring that set his course in the science field. “I’m the beneficiary of really wonderful training and mentorship,” says Meredig. “I can certainly say that I became a scientist and learned to think like a scientist during my time at Northwestern.”
“I’m the beneficiary of really wonderful training and mentorship. I can certainly say that I became a scientist and learned to think like a scientist during my time at Northwestern.” — Bryce Meredig (TGS '12), Founder and Chief Science Officer at Citrine Informatics
Meredig and his team recently collaborated with BASF, one of the world’s largest chemical companies and a field leader in environmental catalysis, to accelerate the development of new environmental catalyst technologies. Catalysis is a science concerned with chemical transformations and how certain types of chemicals can be turned into others as efficiently as possible. In the case of environmental catalysis specifically, a significant portion of the scientific community is interested in transforming pollutants into other chemicals that aren’t as damaging to the earth and the atmosphere. “That’s a characteristic of many of our recent customers, there’s an energy and sustainability component to [our work] simply because that’s where the field of materials science is really focused now,” says Meredig.
In addition to his role at Citrine Informatics, Meredig works to educate others on the field of materials engineering as an adjunct professor at Stanford. Through these efforts, Meredig and his company continue to be leaders and innovators in the collaboration between materials engineering, artificial intelligence, and the sustainable world.
* Editor's Note, November 2022: Bryce Meredig is now Scientific Advisor at Citrine Informatics.