PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Philippe Schwaller

Philippe Schwaller is a chemist and machine-learning researcher who applies language models to chemical synthesis and molecule discovery. After a bachelor's and master's degree in materials science and engineering at EPFL, he spent five years at IBM Research while completing an MPhil in Physics at Cambridge and a PhD in Chemistry and Molecular Sciences at the University of Bern. His Molecular Transformer, published in 2019, treated reaction prediction as machine translation and reached top-1 accuracy above 90% on a common benchmark; RXNMapper followed in 2021, and the ChemCrow chemistry agent appeared in Nature Machine Intelligence in 2024. He received the Hansch Award in 2024 and the Frank Blaney Award in 2025. Since February 2022, he is a tenure-track assistant professor at EPFL, where he leads the Laboratory of Artificial Chemical Intelligence.

Now at
EPFL and Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering

Timeline

  1. 2018–2019

    The Molecular Transformer

    With five coauthors including Teodoro Laino and Alpha A Lee, he posts the Molecular Transformer in 2018 and publishes it in ACS Central Science in 2019. The model treats reaction prediction as machine translation between SMILES strings and reaches top-1 accuracy above 90% on a common benchmark dataset.

  2. 2021

    RXNMapper and chemical grammar

    In 2021, working at IBM Research Europe and the University of Bern, he publishes a Science Advances paper with Benjamin Hoover, Jean-Louis Reymond, Hendrik Strobelt and Teodoro Laino. The paper shows that Transformer neural networks learn atom-mapping information between products and reactants without supervision, and the team builds RXNMapper, an open-source atom-mapping tool, from the attention weights.

  3. By 2022

    EPFL degrees and an IBM PhD

    He earns a bachelor's and master's degree in Materials Science and Engineering at EPFL. During five years at IBM Research, he completes an MPhil in Physics at the University of Cambridge and a PhD in Chemistry and Molecular Sciences with the Reymond group at the University of Bern, before joining EPFL in 2022.

  4. February 2022

    A lab at EPFL

    In February 2022, he joins EPFL as a tenure-track assistant professor at the Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering. He leads the Laboratory of Artificial Chemical Intelligence (LIAC), which works on AI-accelerated discovery and synthesis of molecules.

  5. 2023–2024

    The ChemCrow chemistry agent

    In April 2023, he and coauthors including Andres M. Bran, Sam Cox and Andrew D. White post ChemCrow on arXiv, and Nature Machine Intelligence publishes it in May 2024. ChemCrow is an LLM chemistry agent that integrates 18 expert-designed tools with GPT-4; it autonomously plans and executes the syntheses of an insect repellent and three organocatalysts and guides the discovery of a novel chromophore.

  6. 2024

    The Hansch Award

    In 2024, he receives the Hansch Award for his contributions to chemoinformatics and quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSAR). The award honors young scientists under the age of 40 and is presented at the European Symposium on QSAR (EuroQSAR).

  7. 2025

    The Frank Blaney Award

    In December 2025, the Molecular Graphics and Modelling Society announces that the 2025 Frank Blaney Award, its eighth, goes to him for his contributions to artificial intelligence in chemistry.

  8. As of October 2026

    Assistant professor at EPFL

    He is a tenure-track assistant professor at EPFL, where his group develops AI and machine-learning methods for chemical reasoning, synthesis planning, molecular and materials discovery, and experimental optimization. He is also a core PI of the NCCR Catalysis and co-lead of the Science Pillar in the Swiss AI Initiative.

Career

  1. Since 2022EPFLAssistant Professor
  2. Since 2022Institute of Chemical Sciences and EngineeringLaboratory Leader

Education

  1. EPFLBachelor's and Master's degrees
  2. University of CambridgeMPhil in Physics
  3. University of BernPhD in Chemistry and Molecular Sciences

From the biography.

  1. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes EPFL. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.
  2. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes EPFL. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  3. The United States employs an estimated 48% of people shaping AIIncludes EPFL. We estimate where the people shaping AI work today, how universities, companies and research institutes split across countries, and how country shares have changed since the 1960s.
  4. Universities had a net outflow of 2,068 moves in AI careersIncludes EPFL. Our estimates of career flows and median h-index across universities and companies in AI, including the role of joint appointments and earlier academic jobs.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Philippe Schwaller yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. [1811.02633] Molecular Transformer - A Model for Uncertainty-Calibrated Chemical Reaction Prediction arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. Extraction of organic chemistry grammar from unsupervised learning of chemical reactions - PMC pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. IBM RXN for Chemistry: Unveiling the grammar of the organic chemistry language - IBM Research research.ibm.com. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. Prof. Philippe Schwaller ‒ LIAC ‐ EPFL epfl.ch. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. UNSW School of Photovoltaic & Renewable Energy Engineering - Philippe Schwaller - Language models for accelerated discovery and synthesis www2.pv.unsw.edu.au. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. Conference speaker | Philippe Schwaller | Laboratory of Artificial Chemical Intelligence, EPFL elsevier.com. Checked 22 October 2026.
  7. EPFL - Philippe Schwaller people.epfl.ch. Checked 22 October 2026.
  8. [2304.05376] ChemCrow: Augmenting large-language models with chemistry tools arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  9. Augmenting large language models with chemistry tools | Nature Machine Intelligence nature.com. Checked 22 October 2026.
  10. Philippe Schwaller receives Hansch Award - EPFL actu.epfl.ch. Checked 22 October 2026.
  11. 8th MGMS Frank Blaney Award: Prof Phillipe Schwaller – Molecular Graphics and Modelling Society mgms.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  12. Philippe Schwaller wins MGMS Frank Blaney Award - EPFL actu.epfl.ch. Checked 22 October 2026.
  13. Schwaller Group at EPFL – LIAC schwallergroup.github.io. Checked 22 October 2026.