AI4X Rising Star Award 2026 Winners
Assistant Professor Andy Sode Anker
DTU Energy & DTU Compute, Technical University of Denmark
A tenure-track faculty member at DTU, Andy has earned global recognition including Inflection and Forbes 30 Under 30, alongside significant research funding and leadership roles in publishing and large-scale facilities. His workâspanning generative AI, autonomous robotic synthesis, and advanced scattering analysisâis shaping the future of materials discovery.
Runners-Up & Finalists
Assistant Professor Yeonghun Kang
SungKyunKwan University; U. Toronto & Vector Institute
Yeonghun has authored three highly cited first or co-first papers in Nature Machine Intelligence, Nature Communications, and JACS. His work on metalâorganic frameworks span multi-modal transformers, LLM-based prediction and generation, and automated database construction. Now an Assistant Professor at SKKU, Yeonghun is rapidly advancing the frontiers of AI in materials science.
Junseok Moon
PhD candidate, Seoul National University
Junseok Moon is a PhD candidate at Seoul National University focused on electrocatalysis for clean-energy applications. He is the sole first author of a 2024 Nature Materials paper on closed-loop active-learning discovery of a high-performance perovskite OER catalyst, with a second Nature Materials paper accepted as co-first author. His work has also received national recognition.
Dr. Kiran Vaddi
International Research Associate, NIST
Kiran leads a research program in autonomous experimentation for soft and colloidal matter, including functional data representations of spectroscopy and scattering data with application in differentiable phase mapping and active learning for self-driving laboratories. He serves as PI on a $250K project developing AI agents for stable biotherapeutic formulations.
Dr. Naruki Yoshikawa
Senior Researcher, NIMS
Naruki has a distinctive profile in the self-driving laboratories community, contributing to widely cited work on LLMs for chemical robotics, open-source orchestration platforms such as NIMO and IvoryOS, and review articles in Chemical Reviews, Digital Discovery, and Science Robotics. He currently leads development of the NIMO orchestrator at NIMS.
