I am a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow and Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Robotics and Chemistry Automation at the University of Liverpool. With my group, I am very excited to develop methods towards creating the next generation of robotic scientists for accelerating material discovery.
Research Interests
My research interests lie within the intersection of robotics and applied machine learning, with a particular focus on intelligent robotic manipulation for laboratory environments. I am broadly interested in the following topics:
- contact-based robot skill learning
- failure recovery methods in laboratory environments
- safe human-robot collaboration
- machine vision for laboratory environments
- physics-constrained learning
Moreover, I am passionate about deploying algorithms to control the dynamic behaviour of robots with the goal of moving closer to robots that can adapt in real-world environments.
Openings
I will be hiring PDRAs on new projects starting later this year. Further details on these positions will follow - please email me your CV and short motivation letter if you are interested in joining my group (start date September 2026, potentially earlier).
Most Recent News
(02/2026) Xin has joined my research group as a PDRA on the EPSRC New Investigator Award project. She will be working on co-design of tools for robotic chemists.
(01/26) Our paper has been accepted at IEEE ICRA 2026! Congratulations to my student Nikola on his first PhD paper acceptance!
(01/2026) The 3rd edition of our workshop ADNSL has been accepted for ICRA 2026.
(01/2026) I gave the keynote talk at the New Starters in AI for Chemistry.
(01/2026) I gave an invited talk at the UK Robot Manipulation Workshop 2026.
(01/2026) Together with Andy Cooper, we have been awarded the AI Scientist ARIA grant.
(01/2026) Ayesha has joined my research group as an industry-funded CDT DAMC student, working on a project with Bristol Myers Squibb!
(12/25) Our paper, in collaboration with the Acceleration Consortium, has been accepted in Nature Comp. Sci. Congratulations to all the team!
(08/2025) I have been awarded the EPSRC New Investigator Award with my project Accelerating Laboratory Automation Through Learning Tool Morphology For Robotic Chemists! We will be hiring a PDRA and PhD student to join our group.
(08/2025) Laura and Cenk gave fantastic presentations at TAROS 2025 - Session 9b: Autonomous Robotic Systems for Laboratory Experiments! Congrats to Cenk on winning Best Project/Presentation during the session!
(08/2025) We have organised the second edition of our workshop ADNSL at Accelerate Conference 2025.
(03/2025) We have been awarded the EPSRC AIchemy Pump Priming grant for our project Transforming Chemistry Labs with Safe and Intuitive Human-in-the-Loop Robotic Systems, with University of Nottingham and Dr. Luis Figueredo (PI). Stay tuned for the research outputs from this project!
(03/2025) I gave an invited talk at the AIchemy Annual Conference 2025.
(01/2025) Our paper Multimodal Behaviour Trees for Robotic Laboratory Task Automation has been accepted at IEEE ICRA 2025! Congratulations to all the team!
(12/2024) We have been awarded the Google Deepmind Research Ready grant for our programme ‘Upskilling Students in AI and Robotics for Materials Discovery’. If you are a UK-based student in your penultimate year (and satisfy at least one of the `widening participation criteria’), and would like to join us in Liverpool in Summer 2025, contact me! :)
(11/2024) I gave an invited talk at UoM on Fellowship Grant Application.
(11/2024) I gave an invited talk at the LRC Symposium.
(10/2024) Laura (CDT DAMC) and Cenk (RAEng RF-aligned PhD) have joined my research group as PhD students - stay tuned for their research work on safer and upskilled robotic chemists!
(08/2024) Kevin presented our work on Accelerating Laboratory Automation Through Robot Skill Learning For Sample Scraping at IEEE CASE 2024 which was also nominated for the Best Healthcare Application award!
(06/2024) Alex joined my group as an AIchemy UG student researcher.
(05/2024) I started my role as RAL for CMD at the Henry Royce Institute.
(04/2024) I gave an invited talk at the BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium
(02/2024) Imperial and Liverpool will lead UK’s flagship £12m AI for Chemistry Hub AIChemy - led by Andy and Kim. Thrilled to be part of this exciting research hub.
(02/2024) We are organising the first workshop on Accelerating Discovery in Natural Science Laboratories with AI and Robotics at IEEE ICRA 2024! CFP is out!
(01/2024) Our paper Modular, multi-robot integration of laboratories: an autonomous workflow for solid-state chemistry has been published in Chemical Science. Congrats Amy!