A new home for the Gormley Lab

Welcome to the new Gormley Lab website. We’re repositioning around our core differentiator: self-driving labs that close the loop between robotic synthesis, high-throughput characterization, and machine learning to discover bioactive polymers faster than human-led design.

More news — publications, people, and results — will follow as we migrate content from the previous site.

A self-driving lab designs single-chain polymer nanoparticles

We’re excited to share the lab’s latest self-driving-lab result: Self-driving lab for the data-driven design of single-chain polymer nanoparticles, led by Alex Suponya with the whole team.

The platform runs the full Design → Build → Test → Learn loop on its own — robotic synthesis makes candidate polymers, high-throughput characterization measures them, and active learning decides what to make next. It’s a concrete step toward discovering bioactive polymers faster than human-led design can.

Congratulations to everyone who kept the loop turning on this one.

A user's guide to building your first self-driving lab

How do you actually build a self-driving lab? Our new tutorial in Digital DiscoveryA user’s guide to your first self-driving liquid handling lab, led by Apostolos Maroulis with collaborators including the Webb lab — walks through it end to end: the hardware, the software, and the active-learning loop that ties them together.

The goal is to lower the barrier to entry so more labs can close the loop between automated experimentation and machine learning. Pairs naturally with our open tools and guides.

Celebrating tenure with the lab

The lab came together this month to celebrate Dr. Gormley’s tenure and Presidential Fellowship. It was a chance to mark the milestone with the people who made it possible — the students, postdocs, and collaborators who keep the loop turning. On to what’s next.

Dr. Gormley granted tenure and named a Presidential Fellow

We’re thrilled to share that Dr. Adam Gormley has been granted tenure and promoted to Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering. Alongside the promotion, he was awarded a Presidential Fellowship for Teaching Excellence in recognition of his work with students in the classroom and the lab.

Thank you to everyone — past and present lab members, collaborators, and mentors — who has been part of this journey.

Automated RAFT platform published in Digital Discovery

Congratulations to Jules Lee, whose master’s research — A fully automated platform for photoinitiated RAFT polymerization — is featured in Digital Discovery. The platform automates oxygen-tolerant polymer synthesis end to end, a key building block for the lab’s self-driving approach to biomaterials discovery.