Gerbrand Ceder

The University of California, Berkeley, materials scientist on the hope the next generation of scientists represents

Gerbrand Ceder is a materials scientist and Samsung Distinguished Chair in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Research at the University of California, Berkeley, and is known for pioneering the computational design of materials. He is also a co-founder of Radical AI, a company focused on developing advanced materials using artificial intelligence.

How would you describe the current state of American science?

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I think science is a global sport. It’s not just one country, so I think, overall, the world of science is in good shape, while we may see sometimes occasional hiccups. I think we see science grow all over the world; we see more collaboration. I think it’s a field that still attracts a lot of talent. So, overall, I’m quite optimistic.

I think that, as the science community has grown, there has been an enormous amount of information overload that the community has not figured out how to address. There are millions of research papers published per year now—in popular topics, there are often multiple dozens of papers posted each day. We have to address this issue of the way we do science today, which is: we’re all working in our laboratories by ourselves, then writing papers, and that’s our mode of dissemination of knowledge. I think we may have to question whether that’s still the way forward to go. That system may be hanging on by a thread.

What gives me optimism is that science has a sort of intrinsic way of renewing itself generationally. I think that science regularly needs change, and it needs a lot of it now. But we could either try to change old people like me, or we just let the young people take over, so that’s where my optimism comes in. I see young people just learning AI, applying new approaches to science and loving science in the same way that we did but approaching it in a very different way. So that’s where my optimism is, that it doesn’t really matter how we redirect science; they will redirect it for us.

I think AI will have a tremendous impact in science. Not everybody’s willing to accept that; people don’t like to accept things that may change them or displace them. But from a rational perspective, I think AI will have tremendously positive effects in science. It will help us deal with information overload. It will help us to do things faster, more efficiently. And I see the young crowd just totally buying into that. They are sold completely.