I am Jan and I love automation, because automation allows us to focus on the important things in life.
I currently hold a position of group leader for Materials Informatics at the Max-Planck Institute for Sustainable Materials, where my team and I automate the discovery of sustainable materials by developing workflows for ab-initio thermodynamics using uncertainty quantification to achieve a quantitative predictions in agreement with experiments. Our key strength are our workflow framework and utilities to automate materials discovery, including: pyiron, executorlib and Python Workflow Definition. If you are an aspiring PhD student who wants to join us in the quest of automating materials discovery, please apply via the International Max Planck Research School for Sustainable Metallurgy.
Beyond my professional interest in automation, I also like to automate repetitive tasks in my daily work, incuding: Sorting my emails with gmailsorter or applying large language model agents to automate atomistic materials science simulation with LangSim. Finally, in collaboration with a number of automation experts, I maintain materials informatics related software packages for the conda-forge community to enable reproducibility for workflows in materials science and automate the burden of software maintainence - one package at a time.