Rohit Batra

Timeline

1. 2014–2019

   PhD at the University of Connecticut

   He completes a B.Tech. in metallurgical and materials engineering at IIT Roorkee and a PhD in materials science and engineering at the University of Connecticut. He is a graduate student and then a postdoctoral fellow in Rampi Ramprasad's research group from 2014 to 2019.

2. 2017

   Machine learning in materials informatics

   From the University of Connecticut's Department of Materials Science & Engineering, he coauthors the npj Computational Materials review "Machine learning in materials informatics: recent applications and prospects" in 2017 with Rampi Ramprasad, Ghanshyam Pilania, Arun Mannodi-Kanakkithodi and Chiho Kim. The review covers surrogate machine learning models that predict material properties quickly from past data.

3. 2020

   Predicting water stability of MOFs

   In 2020, he is first author of "Prediction of water stability of metal–organic frameworks using machine learning" in Nature Machine Intelligence, written at Georgia Tech's School of Materials Science and Engineering with Carmen Chen, Tania Evans, Krista Walton and Rampi Ramprasad. The model classifies metal–organic frameworks as stable or unstable in water and is trained on measured data for over 200 of them.

4. 2020–2021

   A review of materials intelligence

   At Argonne National Laboratory's Center for Nanoscale Materials, he writes the Nature Reviews Materials review "Emerging materials intelligence ecosystems propelled by machine learning" with Le Song and Rampi Ramprasad, published online in November 2020 and in volume 6 in 2021. It covers surrogate models of materials properties, materials data repositories, natural language processing of the literature and closed-loop active learning for materials design.

5. July 2022

   Joining IIT Madras

   He joins the Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering at IIT Madras as assistant professor in July 2022, after two postdoctoral appointments at Argonne's Center for Nanoscale Materials and Georgia Tech's School of Materials Science and Engineering. He is also affiliate faculty at the Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, with research interests in machine learning for materials science, polymer informatics, material discovery and material computations.

6. October 2022

   An AI workflow for peptides

   In October 2022, he is first author of "Machine learning overcomes human bias in the discovery of self-assembling peptides" in Nature Chemistry, with Troy Loeffler, Henry Chan, Srilok Srinivasan and colleagues. The AI-expert workflow combines Monte Carlo tree search and random forest with molecular dynamics simulations to search tripeptides and pentapeptides for self-assembly.

7. October 2023

   IISc seminar on materials discovery

   In October 2023, he gives the seminar "Accelerating Materials Discovery Using Computations and Machine Learning" in the Department of Materials Engineering at IISc Bangalore. It covers two design problems in detail: discovery of polymers for high energy capacitor applications and design of self-assembling peptides.

8. As of October 2026

   Sustainable materials discovery with AI

   He is an assistant professor in the Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering at IIT Madras. In October 2026, he coauthors the Nature Sustainability Perspective "Artificial intelligence for life-cycle-aware sustainable materials discovery" with Sajid Mannan, Rupert Myers, Rocío Mercado, Lothar Wondraczek and N. M. Anoop Krishnan, which argues that manufacturing scale, environmental burden and end-of-life questions can enter the discovery process itself.