El Agente Está Presente: The Era of AI Scientists

Speaker

Alán Aspuru-Guzik

Professor of Chemistry and Computer Science, University of Toronto

About This Talk

We stand at the inflection point of “Agentic Science,” where AI is transitioning from a passive generator to a reasoning engine capable of autonomous discovery—able to experiment and uncover new findings on its own. Scientific research—with its many tools, complex problems, and strict physical constraints—requires systems that can plan ahead and correct themselves. In this Wulff Lecture, Alán Aspuru-Guzik will introduce the El Agente ecosystem, a unified AI system designed to automate the full research process.
 
Moving beyond standard AI approaches, Aspuru-Guzik presents a hierarchical multi-agent framework that overcomes the “tool-use bottleneck” through dynamic planning and modular memory. He will discuss how to engineer agents capable of Guided Deep Research, a mechanism that enables AI systems to understand complex technical documentation and generate code for diverse simulation environments—even ones they were not explicitly trained on. Finally, he will show how grounding AI in precise 3D reasoning tools bridges the gap between creative intent and physical constraints. This architecture represents a blueprint for the next generation of AI: systems that not only assist but also collaborate, reason, and discover.

About the Speaker

Alán Aspuru-Guzik is a professor at the University of Toronto, with primary appointments in the Departments of Chemistry and Computer Science and cross-appointments in Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry, Materials Science and Engineering, and the Institute of Medical Science. He is senior director at NVIDIA Research, CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, director of the Acceleration Consortium, and co-director of the CIFAR Accelerated Decarbonization program.
 
His research centers on the integration of artificial intelligence, automation, and the natural sciences, with applications spanning functional materials, robotics, and quantum computing. He is editor-in-chief of the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Digital Discovery and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
 
Aspuru-Guzik began his independent career at Harvard University in 2006 and was a full professor there from 2013 to 2018. He received his B.Sc. from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1999 and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Berkeley from 2005 to 2006.

About the Wulff Lecture

The Wulff Lecture is an engaging and accessible presentation designed for a broad audience. Its purpose is to inform, inspire, and motivate MIT undergraduates to explore the study of materials science and engineering. The event extends an invitation to all MIT, with a special emphasis on welcoming first-year students. Learn more