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Podcast Ep 23: When R&D Meets AI

Learn how AI is revolutionizing materials development, reducing timelines, and enhancing sustainability with insights from Greg Mulholland of Citrine Informatics.
Greg Mulholland, CEO Citrine Informatics

- Compressing Materials Development Timelines - Listen Here


The materials and process industries sit at an inflection point with AI. The question is no longer whether AI can do something interesting in R&D — it can. The question is whether it can do something commercially useful, repeatedly, within the constraints of a real manufacturing environment. Greg Mulholland has been building the answer to that question at Citrine Informatics.

Greg and I discussed how AI is changing the pace and precision of materials development: turning scattered lab data into directed R&D guidance, encoding scientific intuition so it doesn't walk out the door when a chemist retires, and enabling application engineers to respond to customer requirements in days instead of weeks.

Who should listen:

  • Materials and chemicals executives running R&D or innovation functions
  • Leaders trying to understand what AI can actually deliver in a capital-intensive, manufacturing-constrained environment
  • Innovation leaders navigating the gap between AI potential and commercial reality

Topics covered:

  • Turning scattered, under-specified lab data into usable digital assets for R&D
  • Capturing scientific intuition and heuristics to augment your best chemists and formulators
  • Using bounded search spaces to keep AI recommendations manufacturable, scalable, and within cost and supply constraints
  • Enabling application engineers and business developers to respond to customer requests in days instead of weeks

Show Notes


Mulholland Headshot 2

Greg Mulholland
Guest Speaker

CEO, Citrine Informatics

Greg Mulholland is the co-founder and CEO of Citrine Informatics, the leading AI platform for materials and chemicals development. He founded Citrine in 2013 on a simple conviction: that the materials science industry — critical to solving the world's most pressing environmental challenges — was still discovering new materials the way Edison would have, and that AI could fundamentally change that. 

Under his leadership, Citrine has defined the field of materials informatics, serving global chemicals and materials companies and earning recognition as a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, CB Insights AI 100 company, and World Materials Forum Startup of the Year.

Greg holds an MBA from Stanford, an MPhil in Materials Science from the University of Cambridge, and a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from NC State University.